WOW!
You took that poor boy to the woodshed, but good!
He's so ignorant though, he'll never recognize it.
Just like my answers to his questionaire earlier this week, he ignored them
too.
Ignorance is as ignorance does.

"Robert Sturgeon" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 23 Dec 2003 06:24:42 GMT, Jonathan Ball
wrote:

Robert Sturgeon wrote:

On Tue, 23 Dec 2003 05:39:47 GMT, Jonathan Ball
wrote:


Robert Sturgeon wrote:


On Tue, 23 Dec 2003 03:13:36 GMT, Jonathan Ball
wrote:



Robert Sturgeon wrote:



On Tue, 23 Dec 2003 02:49:55 GMT, Jonathan Ball
wrote:

(snippage of the rantings of an "expert" with letters after
his name, but no common sense at all)

In other words, you snip out, once again, authoritative
(relative to you) material that you simply cannot
refute, because it is right, you are wrong, and you
don't know what you're talking about.


Still no answer to Greenspan's concerns about investors'
irrational exuberance?

He wasn't speaking as an economist.


LOL. That's rich.

It's the truth. A lot of the fed chairman's job has
nothing whatever to do with economics...and economics,
of course, has nothing to do with psychology.

On Fox News this morning (paraphrasing) "Economists
concerned about lower consumer confidence." Apparently
economists have some way of studying consumer confidence,
and even more apparently, they care what it is. But since
you say economists don't care about psychology, this must
have been an error. Or were those economists also not
speaking as economists?

Time for a candid admission, bobby: you simply don't
know what you're talking about on the issue. You know
NEITHER economics nor psychology; you were just running
your ignorant mouth.

Casting aspersions on another really doesn't win you any
debating points. Instead, you might consider explaining why
economists study consumer confidence, market sentiment, the
irrational exuberance that powers bubble markets, that sort
of thing - psychological aspects of economics that you
assure us economists don't care one whit about.

I do thank you for your rudeness, because it has prompted me
to do some more research into this matter. I did an Alta
Vista search using the key words: economics and psychology.
It returned 588,142 results. As might be expected from
reading your tirades, it is easy to find articles on the
differences between the two. But it is also easy to find
articles to the contrary. Heres one:

http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/5-30-2002-19412.asp

"It is impossible to describe any human action if one does
not refer to the meaning the actor sees in the stimulus as
well as in the end his response is aiming at.
Ludwig von Mises"

"Economics - to the great dismay of economists - is merely a
branch of psychology. It deals with individual behaviour and
with mass behaviour. Many of its practitioners sought to
disguise its nature as a social science by applying complex
mathematics where common sense and direct experimentation
would have yielded far better results."

The article is quite lengthy. I won't repost it in its
entirety. It was written by an actual economist - "Sam
Vaknin, United Press International Senior Business
Correspondent, columnist for Central Europe Review and
eBookWeb.org, editor in the Open Directory Project, and
former economic advisor to the government of Macedonia and
to blue-chip firms in many countries." It looks like he has
better credentials than you do, and he doesn't agree with
you.

Here's a NEW (i.e., you probably didn't study it at UCLA)
textbook for sale at Amazon.com from Kluwer Academic
Publishers by Gerrit Antonides:

"Editorial Reviews
Book Description
Psychology in Economics and Business is the first textbook
in economic psychology that is targeted at students of
economics and business administration. It describes the
experiments and explains the psychological background
associated with the topics. The book presents the state of
the art in behavioral economics and economic psychology and
their applications to economics and business. The first part
organizes economic psychological themes within a common
paradigm. The applications belong to a great variety of
fields in economic psychology, including entrepreneurial
behavior, perceptions of price, risk, inflation and economic
activities, economic socialization, demand theory, attitudes
and brand images, decision making and heuristics, economic
expectations, well-being, poverty and consumer satisfaction.
The second part deals with information processing in a wider
sense. The psychological principles of consistency and
attribution are dealt with and recent developments in
rationality and choice under uncertainty are considered. A
chapter on game theory focuses on psychological factors in
several social dilemmas. Strategies and tactics in human
interaction are dealt with in a chapter on negotiation
behavior. The chapter on economic psychological methods
deals with the acquisition of knowledge from the observation
of economic behavior in reality and in experimental
settings."

While we're at Amazon, we can buy Market Volatility
by Robert J. Shiller.

"Editorial Reviews
Book Description
Market Volatility proposes an innovative theory, backed by
substantial statistical evidence, on the causes of price
fluctuations in speculative markets. It challenges the
standard efficient-markets model for explaining asset prices
by emphasizing the significant role that popular opinion or
psychology can play in price volatility.
Offering detailed analyses of the stock, the bond, and the
real estate markets, Shiller discusses the relations of
these speculative prices and extends the analysis of
speculative markets to macroeconomic activity in general."

"Robert J. Shiller is Stanley B. Resor Professor of
Economics at the Cowles Foundation, Yale University."

And this Shiller fellow is an actual economics professor -
at Yale, no less.

Here's a web page by Jim Mallon, Napier University:
http://www.nubs.napier.ac.uk/nubs/Econ/Staff/mallon.htm

"Research Interests
Psychology in Economics with particular relevance to
financial markets and personal financial planning."

Well, he's in Scotland, so he probably doesn't count...
right?

From the University of California's eScholarship Repository
http://repositories.cdlib.org/iber/econ/E02-313/

"A Perspective on Psychology and Economics
Matthew Rabin, University of California, Berkeley"

"ABSTRACT:
This essay provides a perspective on the trend towards
integrating psychology into economics. Some topics are
discussed, and arguments are provided for why movement
towards greater psychological realism in economics will
improve mainstream economics."

But he's a Jew, so he probably doesn't know anything about
economics or psychology, despite being a MacArthur
Foundation Fellow, right?

From MIT
http://web.mit.edu/annualreports/pres99/12.02.html

"DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS
The goal of the MIT Department of Economics is to be the
best economics department in the world. To achieve this
goal, we strive to maintain an outstanding faculty, to have
the best Ph.D. program in economics, and to provide an
outstanding education in economics for MIT undergraduates."

...

"There were seven visiting faculty for all or part of the
1998-99 academic year. Visiting Professor Jean Tirole taught
a topics course in industrial organization. Visiting
Professor Roger Brinner taught macroeconomics. Visiting
Associate Professor Beatriz Armendariz de Aghion taught
development. Visiting Assistant Professor Jinyong Hahn
taught econometrics. Visiting Professor Alberto Alesina
taught macroeconomics. Visiting Professor Mathias
Dewatripont taught theory. Post-Doctoral Associate, Xavier
Gabaix, taught a topics course on psychology in economics."

But maybe you know more about economics than the Department
of Economics at MIT...

And then there's the International Association for Research
in Economic Psychology -
http://www.ex.ac.uk/~SEGLea/iarep/welcome.html

But they're just damned Brits, so...

Here's something from the Journal of Economic Psychology
http://www.elsevier.nl/inca/publicat...e/5/0/5/5/8/9/

"The Journal aims to present research that will improve
understanding of behavioral, especially socio-psychological,
aspects of economic phenomena and processes. The Journal
seeks to be a channel for the increased interest in using
behavioral science methods for the study of economic
behavior, and so to contribute to better solutions of
societal problems, by stimulating new approaches and new
theorizing about economic affairs. Economic psychology as a
discipline studies the psychological mechanisms that
underlie consumption and other economic behavior. It deals
with preferences, choices, decisions, and factors
influencing these, as well as the consequences of decisions
and choices with respect to the satisfaction of needs. This
includes the impact of external economic phenomena upon
human behavior and well-being. Studies in economic
psychology may relate to different levels of aggregation,
from the household and the individual consumer to the macro
level of whole nations. Economic behavior in connection with
inflation, unemployment, taxation, economic development, as
well as consumer information and economic behavior in the
market place are thus the major fields of interest.
The Journal of Economic Psychology contains: (a) reports of
empirical research on economic behavior; (b) assessments of
the state of the art in various subfields of economic
psychology; (c) articles providing a theoretical perspective
or a frame of reference for the study of economic behavior;
(d) articles explaining the implications of theoretical
developments for practical applications; (e) book reviews;
(f) announcements of meetings, conferences and seminars.
Special issues of the Journal may be devoted to themes of
particular interest. The Journal will encourage exchange of
information between researchers and practitioners by being a
forum for discussion and debate of issues in both
theoretical and applied research."

I could go on, but I don't think doing so would change your
mind, it being fixed on the day you received your degree
from UCLA.

Anyone else so foolish as to have read this thread so far is
welcome to reach his own conclusion as to whether or not
economics is a subset of psychology. People with better
credentials than Mr. Ball say it is.

--
Robert Sturgeon,
proud member of the vast right wing conspiracy
and the evil gun culture.