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Posted by: gamahuche 6 months, 2 weeks ago

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gamahuche6 months, 2 weeks ago

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This was the bit I liked - and was able to understand, even after being up all night..
Its a good effort to remove the dismal label from economics!
FTA
The economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller suggest a third reason. In their view, the problem is also intellectual—a systematic failure of thinking on the part of their fellow economists. Taking the title of their new book from a phrase famously used by John Maynard Keynes, Akerlof and Shiller argue that what is missing in the worldview of today's economists is sufficient attention to "animal spirits," by which they mean the psychological and even irrational elements that figure importantly in so many other familiar aspects of personal choices and personal behavior, and that, they believe, pervade economic behavior too.

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  deathray6 months, 2 weeks ago
  
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  i am an advocate for behavioral economics
  
  that economics is viewed as distinct from the human sciences has always struck me as somewhat disingenuous. economics, ultimately, is the science that defines the domain of the tension between greed and the greater good.
  
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    gamahuche6 months, 2 weeks ago
    
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    Sometimes it was actually NOT such a great idea when it DID get closely meshed with the human sciences - though perhaps in the instance I just dug up inhuman science might be a better description!
    I was looking up the origin of economic as a DISMAL science when I ran into this exceptionay dismal example ..
    http://www.economicshelp.org/2008/07/why-is-econom...
    Here's the most germane portion of this truly shocking interpretation:
    From the Blog:
    It appears that the term 'dismal science' was first coined by Thomas Carlyle, in December 1849, “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” in the London monthly Fraser’s Magazine.
    
    In particular, Carlyle was criticising the economists belief in supply and demand which stood in sharp contrast to his idealised view of a slave society. Carlyle, like many of the Victorian age, considered blacks to be inferior to whites (he referred to blacks as ("two-legged cattle") and therefore these non whites needed the 'beneficient whip' to be useful to society. This view, he held, justified slavery as a model for society, and he criticised those economists and evangelists who believed in equality and freedom of the people. This view on equality was held by thinkers such as John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau and Charles Darwin. But, at the time many such as Carlyle, Dickens and Alfred Tennyson did not hold this belief.
    
    Carlyle's view on Economics was
    "quite abject and distressing...dismal science...led by sacred cause of Black Emancipation."
    
    Thus in a nutshell, Carlyle dislike economics because of its support for black emancipation and the ending of slavery
    
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