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Economics () is a behavioral science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.
Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics analyses what is viewed as basic elements within economies, including individual agents and markets, their interactions, and the outcomes of interactions. Individual agents may include, for example, households, firms, buyers, and sellers. Macroeconomics analyses economies as systems where production, distribution, consumption, savings, and investment expenditure interact; and the factors of production affecting them, such as: labour, capital, land, and enterprise, inflation, economic growth, and public policies that impact these elements. It also seeks to analyse and describe the global economy. (Full article...)
Selected general articlesPosthumous Muir portrait, c. 1800
(baptised 16 June [
O.S.5 June] 1723 – 17 July 1790) was a Scottish economist and philosopher who was a pioneer in the field of
political economyand key figure during the
Scottish Enlightenment. Seen by some as the "father of economics" or the "father of
capitalism". He is known for two classic works:
The Theory of Moral Sentiments(1759) and
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations(1776). The latter, often abbreviated as
The Wealth of Nations, is regarded as his
magnum opus, marking the inception of modern economic scholarship as a comprehensive system and an academic discipline. Smith refuses to explain the distribution of wealth and power in terms of
divine willand instead appeals to natural, political, social, economic, legal, environmental and technological factors, as well as the interactions among them. The work is notable for its contribution to economic theory, particularly in its exposition of concept of
absolute advantage.
Smith studied social philosophy at the University of Glasgow and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was one of the first students to benefit from scholarships set up by John Snell. Following his graduation, he delivered a successful series of public lectures at the University of Edinburgh, that met with acclaim. This led to a collaboration with David Hume during the Scottish Enlightenment. Smith obtained a professorship at Glasgow, where he taught moral philosophy. During this period, he wrote and published The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Subsequently, he assumed a tutoring position that facilitated travel throughout Europe, where he encountered intellectual figures of his era. (Full article...)
(
; 1 September 1835 – 13 August 1882) was an English
economistand
logician.
Irving Fisher described Jevons's book A General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy (1862) as the start of the mathematical method in economics. It made the case that economics, as a science concerned with quantities, is necessarily mathematical. In so doing, it expounded upon the "final" (marginal) utility theory of value. Jevons' work, along with similar discoveries made by Carl Menger in Vienna (1871) and by Léon Walras in Switzerland (1874), marked the opening of a new period in the history of economic thought. Jevons's contribution to the marginal revolution in economics in the late 19th century established his reputation as a leading political economist and logician of the time. (Full article...)
(August 23, 1921 – February 21, 2017) was an American economist, mathematician and
political theorist. He received the
John Bates Clark Medalin 1957, and the
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciencesin 1972, along with
John Hicks.
In economics, Arrow was a major figure in postwar neoclassical economic theory. Four of his students (Roger Myerson, Eric Maskin, John Harsanyi, and Michael Spence) went on to become Nobel laureates themselves. His contributions to social choice theory, notably his "impossibility theorem", and his work on general equilibrium analysis are significant. His work in many other areas of economics, including endogenous growth theory and the economics of information, was also foundational. (Full article...)
(
German: [ˈkaʁl ˈmaʁks]; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German
philosopher, political theorist, economist, journalist, and
revolutionary socialist. He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet
The Communist Manifesto(written with
Friedrich Engels), and his three-volume
Das Kapital(1867–1894), a
critique of classical political economywhich employs his theory of
historical materialismin an analysis of
capitalism, in the culmination of his life's work. Marx's ideas and their subsequent development, collectively known as
Marxism, have had enormous influence.
Born in Trier in the Kingdom of Prussia, Marx studied at the universities of Bonn and Berlin, and received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Jena in 1841. A Young Hegelian, he was influenced by the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and both critiqued and developed Hegel's ideas in works such as The German Ideology (written 1846) and the Grundrisse (written 1857–1858). While in Paris, Marx wrote his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and met Engels, who became his closest friend and collaborator. After moving to Brussels in 1845, they were active in the Communist League, and in 1848 they wrote The Communist Manifesto, which expresses Marx's ideas and lays out a programme for revolution. Marx was expelled from Belgium and Germany, and in 1849 moved to London, where he wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) and Das Kapital. From 1864, Marx was involved in the International Workingmen's Association (First International), in which he fought the influence of anarchists led by Mikhail Bakunin. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), Marx wrote on revolution, the state and the transition to communism. He died stateless in 1883 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery. (Full article...)
Ragnar Frisch, c. before 1944
(3 March 1895 – 31 January 1973) was an influential
Norwegian economistand
econometricianknown for being one of the major contributors to establishing economics as a quantitative and statistically informed science in the early 20th century. He coined the term
econometricsin 1926 for utilising statistical methods to describe economic systems, as well as the terms
microeconomicsand
macroeconomicsin 1933, for describing individual and aggregate economic systems, respectively. He was the first to develop a statistically informed model of business cycles in 1933. Later work on the model, together with
Jan Tinbergen, won the first
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciencesin 1969.
Frisch became dr.philos. with a thesis on mathematics and statistics at the University of Oslo in 1926. After his doctoral thesis, he spent five years researching in the United States at the University of Minnesota and Yale University. After teaching briefly at Yale from 1930–31, he was offered a full professorship in economics, which he declined after pressures by colleagues to return to the University of Oslo. After returning to Oslo, Frisch was first appointed by the King-in-Council as Professor of Economics and Statistics at the Faculty of Law, University of Oslo (then the Royal Frederick University) in 1931, before becoming leader of the newly founded Institute of Economics at the University of Oslo in 1932. He remained at the University of Oslo until his retirement in 1965. (Full article...)
, or the
Marxian school of economics, is a
heterodoxschool of political economic thought. Its foundations can be traced back to
Karl Marx's critique of political economy. However, unlike
critics of political economy, Marxian economists tend to accept the concept of
the economy prima facie. Marxian economics comprises several different theories and includes multiple schools of thought, which are sometimes opposed to each other; in many cases Marxian analysis is used to complement, or to supplement, other economic approaches. An example can be found in the works of Soviet economists like
Lev Gatovsky, who sought to apply Marxist economic theory to the objectives, needs, and political conditions of the socialist construction in the Soviet Union, contributing to the development of Soviet
political economy.
Marxian economics concerns itself variously with the analysis of crisis in capitalism, the role and distribution of the surplus product and surplus value in various types of economic systems, the nature and origin of economic value, the impact of class and class struggle on economic and political processes, and the process of economic evolution. (Full article...)
(
; born February 9, 1943) is an American
New Keynesian economist, a
public policy analyst, political activist, and a professor at
Columbia University. He is a recipient of the
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences(2001) and the
John Bates Clark Medal(1979). He is a former senior vice president and
chief economistof the
World Bank. He is also a former member and chairman of the U.S.
Council of Economic Advisers. He is known for his support for the
Georgistpublic finance theory and for his critical view of the management of
globalization, of
laissez-faireeconomists (whom he calls "
free-market fundamentalists"), and of international institutions such as the
International Monetary Fundand the
World Bank.
In 2000, Stiglitz founded the Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD), a think tank on international development based at Columbia University. He has been a member of the Columbia faculty since 2001 and received the university's highest academic rank (university professor) in 2003. He was the founding chair of the university's Committee on Global Thought. He also chairs the University of Manchester's Brooks World Poverty Institute. He was a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. In 2009, the President of the United Nations General Assembly Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, appointed Stiglitz as the chairman of the U.N. Commission on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System, where he oversaw suggested proposals and commissioned a report on reforming the international monetary and financial system. He served as the chair of the international Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, appointed by the French President Sarkozy, which issued its report in 2010, Mismeasuring our Lives: Why GDP doesn't add up, and currently serves as co-chair of its successor, the High Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. From 2011 to 2014, Stiglitz was the president of the International Economic Association (IEA). He presided over the organization of the IEA triennial world congress held near the Dead Sea in Jordan in June 2014. (Full article...)
Feminist economics is the critical study of economics and economies, with a focus on gender-aware and inclusive economic inquiry and policy analysis. Feminist economic researchers include academics, activists, policy theorists, and practitioners. Much feminist economic research focuses on topics that have been neglected in the field, such as care work, intimate partner violence, or on economic theories which could be improved through better incorporation of gendered effects and interactions, such as between paid and unpaid sectors of economies. Other feminist scholars have engaged in new forms of data collection and measurement such as the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), and more gender-aware theories such as the capabilities approach. Feminist economics is oriented toward the social ecology of money.
Feminist economists call attention to the social constructions of traditional economics, questioning the extent to which it is positive and objective, and showing how its models and methods are biased by an exclusive attention to masculine-associated topics and a one-sided favoring of masculine-associated assumptions and methods. While economics traditionally focused on markets and masculine-associated ideas of autonomy, abstraction and logic, feminist economists call for a fuller exploration of economic life, including such "culturally feminine" topics such as family economics, and examining the importance of connections, concreteness, and emotion in explaining economic phenomena. (Full article...)
or simply the first
critique of economyis a form of
social critiquethat rejects the conventional ways of distributing resources. The critique also rejects what its advocates believe are unrealistic
axioms, flawed historical assumptions, and taking conventional economic mechanisms as a given
or as
transhistorical(true for all human societies for all time). The critique asserts the conventional economy is merely one of many types of historically specific ways to distribute resources, which emerged along with
modernity(post-Renaissance Western society).
Critics of political economy do not necessarily aim to create their own theories regarding how to administer economies. Critics of economy commonly view "the economy" as a bundle of concepts and societal and normative practices, rather than being the result of any self-evident economic laws. Hence, they also tend to consider the views which are commonplace within the field of economics as faulty, or simply as pseudoscience. (Full article...)
(
KAYN-zee-ən; sometimes
Keynesianism, named after British economist
John Maynard Keynes) are the various
macroeconomictheories and
modelsof how
aggregate demand(total spending in the
economy) strongly influences
economic outputand
inflation. In the Keynesian view, aggregate demand does not necessarily equal the
productive capacity of the economy. It is influenced by a host of factors that sometimes behave erratically and impact production, employment, and
inflation.
Keynesian economists generally argue that aggregate demand is volatile and unstable and that, consequently, a market economy often experiences inefficient macroeconomic outcomes, including recessions when demand is too low and inflation when demand is too high. Further, they argue that these economic fluctuations can be mitigated by economic policy responses coordinated between a government and their central bank. In particular, fiscal policy actions taken by the government and monetary policy actions taken by the central bank, can help stabilize economic output, inflation, and unemployment over the business cycle. Keynesian economists generally advocate a regulated market economy – predominantly private sector, but with an active role for government intervention during recessions and depressions. (Full article...)
(
;
French: [fʁɑ̃swa kɛnɛ]; 4 June 1694 – 16 December 1774) was a French
economistand
physicianof the
Physiocraticschool. He is known for publishing the "
Tableau économique" (Economic Table) in 1758, which provided the foundations of the ideas of the Physiocrats. This was perhaps the first work attempting to describe the workings of the economy in an analytical way, and as such can be viewed as one of the first important contributions to economic thought. His
Le Despotisme de la Chine, written in 1767, describes Chinese politics and society, and his own political support for enlightened
despotism. (
Full article...)
From a legal point of view, a
contractis an institutional arrangement for the way in which resources flow, which defines the various relationships between the parties to a transaction or limits the rights and obligations of the parties.
From an economic perspective, contract theory studies how economic actors can and do construct contractual arrangements, generally in the presence of information asymmetry. Because of its connections with both agency and incentives, contract theory is often categorized within a field known as law and economics. One prominent application of it is the design of optimal schemes of managerial compensation. In the field of economics, the first formal treatment of this topic was given by Kenneth Arrow in the 1960s. In 2016, Oliver Hart and Bengt R. Holmström both received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for their work on contract theory, covering many topics from CEO pay to privatizations. Holmström focused more on the connection between incentives and risk, while Hart on the unpredictability of the future that creates holes in contracts. (Full article...)
is the study of
mathematical modelsof strategic interactions. It has applications in many fields of
social science, and is used extensively in
economics,
logic,
systems scienceand
computer science. Initially, game theory addressed two-person
zero-sum games, in which a participant's gains or losses are exactly balanced by the losses and gains of the other participant. In the 1950s, it was extended to the study of non zero-sum games, and was eventually applied to a wide range of
behavioral relations. It is now an
umbrella termfor the
scienceof rational
decision makingin humans, animals, and computers.
Modern game theory began with the idea of mixed-strategy equilibria in two-person zero-sum games and its proof by John von Neumann. Von Neumann's original proof used the Brouwer fixed-point theorem on continuous mappings into compact convex sets, which became a standard method in game theory and mathematical economics. His paper was followed by Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944), co-written with Oskar Morgenstern, which considered cooperative games of several players. The second edition provided an axiomatic theory of expected utility, which allowed mathematical statisticians and economists to treat decision-making under uncertainty. (Full article...)
(February 27, 1867 – April 29, 1947) was an American
economist,
statistician, inventor,
eugenicistand
progressivesocial campaigner. He was one of the earliest American
neoclassical economists, though his later work on
debt deflationhas been embraced by the
post-Keynesianschool.
Joseph Schumpeterdescribed him as "the greatest economist the United States has ever produced", an assessment later repeated by
James Tobinand
Milton Friedman.
Fisher made important contributions to utility theory and general equilibrium. He was also a pioneer in the rigorous study of intertemporal choice in markets, which led him to develop a theory of capital and interest rates. His research on the quantity theory of money inaugurated the school of macroeconomic thought known as "monetarism". Fisher was also a pioneer of econometrics, including the development of index numbers. Some concepts named after him include the Fisher equation, the Fisher hypothesis, the international Fisher effect, the Fisher separation theorem and Fisher market. (Full article...)
(
French: [valʁas]; 16 December 1834 – 5 January 1910) was a French
mathematical economistand
Georgist. He formulated the
marginal theory of value(independently of
William Stanley Jevonsand
Carl Menger) and pioneered the development of
general equilibrium theory. Walras is best known for his book
Éléments d'économie politique pure, a work that has contributed greatly to the mathematization of economics through the concept of general equilibrium.
For Walras, exchanges only take place after a Walrasian tâtonnement (French for "trial and error"), guided by the auctioneer, has made it possible to reach market equilibrium. It was the general equilibrium obtained from a single hypothesis, rarity, that led Joseph Schumpeter to consider him "the greatest of all economists". The notion of general equilibrium was very quickly adopted by major economists such as Vilfredo Pareto, Knut Wicksell and Gustav Cassel. John Hicks and Paul Samuelson used the Walrasian contribution in the elaboration of the neoclassical synthesis. For their part, Kenneth Arrow and Gérard Debreu, from the perspective of a logician and a mathematician, determined the conditions necessary for equilibrium. (Full article...)
(
Bengali: [ˈɔmortːo ˈʃen]; born 3 November 1933) is an Indian economist and philosopher. Sen has taught and worked in England and the United States since 1972. In 1998, Sen received the
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciencesfor his contributions to
welfare economics. He has also made major scholarly contributions to
social choice theory,
economicand
social justice, economic theories of
famines,
decision theory,
development economics,
public health, and the measures of
well-beingof countries.
Sen is currently the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor, and Professor of Economics and Philosophy, at Harvard University. He previously served as Master of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. In 1999, he received India's highest civilian honour, Bharat Ratna, for his contribution to welfare economics. The German Publishers and Booksellers Association awarded him the 2020 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade for his pioneering scholarship addressing issues of global justice and combating social inequality in education and healthcare. (Full article...)
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