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"Left wing kookiness"
vincent p. norris wrote:
Do you have any idea of how easy that argument is to turn around? "I understand economics, but you only think you do." Not exactly overwhelming. Well, for 34 years, I was paid to teach courses in economics. That included judging whether others (my students) understood it. Apparently someone thought I was qualified to do that. What's your take on bobby's basic point: that economics is a "subset" of psychology? I maintain it's crap. Economics issues were *considered* by some philosophers before the emergence of economics as a distinct academic discipline, and some of those philosophers may well have thought about human psychology as well. However, Smith, Ricardo, Say, Marshall and others clearly were not studying psychology, and then spun off into economics. 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. 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; all that is required is a diminishing marginal rate of substitution between two goods, which is what we observe in the real world. Economics is not a "subset" of psychology. Are you? bobby, the person to whom you are replying, has by his own admission read ONE economics textbook in his life. It was a lower division intro book at that. He is not qualified to talk about economics, either the subject as it is currently taught and studied today, or the history of it. |
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