Objective Beancounter Economics is a strange mixture of assertions, theories, common sense and, occasionally, the blindingly obvious! In this blog, I am trying to define Economics, Economists and a potted guide to the way economics and economists analyze problems. The word ‘economics’ comes from two Greek words, ‘eco’ meaning home and ‘nomos’ meaning accounts. Economics has developed from being about how to keep the family accounts into the wide-ranging subject of today. Economics has grown in scope, very slowly up to the 19th century, but at an accelerating rate ever since. Today it has many of the features of a language. It has linguistic roots, grammatical rules, good and bad constructions, dialects and a wide vocabulary which grows and changes over time. You may already have studied economics and there is the danger that the language that you learnt has changed. Also, there are different ways of learning economics. There is no ‘right’ order to tackle them, so choose your own path.
Not all economists agree with Keynes. The Nobel Laureate, Robert Lucas sees the role of economists being limited to building predictive models. His models view people as if they are machines, carefully optimising their utility as if they were solving a mathematics problem. Kenneth Boulding on the other hand considers economics in turn as a social, ecological, behavioural, political, mathematical, and moral science: “Economic man is a clod, heroic man is a fool, but somewhere between the clod and the fool, human man, if the expression may be pardoned, steers his tottering way.”
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