What's your take on bobby's basic point: that
economics is a "subset" of psychology?

I may have come to this thread late, so I don't know if that was
bobby's basic point, but I've already posted my disagreement with it.

I maintain it's crap. Economics issues were
*considered* by some philosophers before the emergence
of economics as a distinct academic discipline,
....

Because they concern matters, ultimately, of life and death, economic
writings are as old as civilization. Civlization was originally based
on the control of water and arable land along the Tigris and
Euphrates, the Indus River in India, etc. Civilization also introduced
"taxation" and required record keeping.

Of course, men had economies, and no doubt argued about them, long
before civilization, otherwise they would have starved or frozen to
death. But they left no writings for us to examine.

During the Middle Ages, economic writings were based on Christian
thought. A crucial concept was Justium Pretium, the "just price."
Profit-seeking was sinful. Consider: "It is easier for a camel to
pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the
gates of heaven." "What does it profit a man to gain wht the whole
world but lose lhis immortal soul?"

After the Reanaissance, the prevailing view was "Mercantilism," the
key notion of which was that economic activity was to enrich the
Crown, not provided for the welfare of ordinary people. The "Trade
and Navigation Acts," against which the colonists rebelled, were
Mercantilist laws.

Adam Smith, who published _An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of
the Wealth of Nations_, 1776, was a professor of moral philosophy,
(there were no "economists" yet) a branch of philosophy that dealt
with questions of right and wrong--including the right way to use
resources, the right way to distribute wealth, etc.

People have always thought about what we today call "psychology," too.
The Greeks wrote about the question "How do we know what we know?"
That branch of philosophy was known as "epistemology." There's a
consensus that "psychology" was born about 1870, a century after
Smith's Wealth of Nations and after the "Classical Economists" such as
Ricardo, Malthus, James and John Stuart Mill, Jevons, and others had
written numerous books aobut political economy.

When I studied economics as an undergraduate and in
graduate school, consumer preference was taken as a
given, and the notion of utility was being abandoned.

I retired ten years ago, but at that time, the concept of utility was
still being included in the introductory texts. But textbooks are not
always up-to-the-minute with the latest developments.

One of my professors in grad school at UCLA, Armen
Alchian, demonstrated decades ago that downward sloping
demand curves can be obtained without considering
"utility" at all;

"Indifference analysis" has been around for many years.

all that is required is a diminishing
marginal rate of substitution between two goods, which
is what we observe in the real world.

The the purpose of "theory" in any science is to explain what we
observe in the real world. Merely observing it is insufficient.

vince norris