2018 HES PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS: FOLK WISDOM IN ECONOMICS

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Evelyn L. Forget

This article highlights the roles played by knowledge brokers in the history of economics. Knowledge creation is the joint product of teams of people engaged in parallel work. Economists do their professional work, whether that involves creating elaborate theories, gathering and interpreting data, or conducting experiments, all the while creating a variety of competing narratives about the economy. Economic agents go about their daily lives creating goods and services, caring for one another, saving and consuming, all the while making decisions based on whatever narratives they believe about how the economy functions. The various narratives between and among economists and economic agents create market opportunities for knowledge brokers, who sell their services to whoever will pay. They popularize economic insights in bestselling books, and work for think tanks or with various organizations, but they are also textbook writers, journal editors, and conference organizers, all of whom jointly contribute to the edifice of economic knowledge and facilitate communication. European beekeeping is used as an analogy.

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (7) ◽  
pp. 1202-1222
Author(s):  
M.V. Grechko ◽  
L.A. Kobina ◽  
S.A. Goncharenko

Subject. The article focuses on the decision-making mechanism used by economic agents given the existing social constraints. Objectives. We devise applied toolkit to study how socio-economic constraints transform the decision-making mechanism used by economic agents. Methods. The study involves means of the expert survey, the method that streamlines economic knowledge. Results. Social constraints are illustrated to influence the decision-making mechanism used by economic agents, assuming that the individual mind relies on specific mechanisms to make judgments and decisions. Generally, the mechanisms are very useful, however they may generate serious errors during the decision-making process. Given the social constraints, economic agents were found to follow four mental models to make their decisions in case of the full or partial uncertainty, i.e. the representative relevance, accessibility, relations, heuristics (modeling). Conclusions and Relevance. The scientific ideas herein show that the inner architecture of a choice an individual makes determines his or her decisions. The decisions often depend on the contextual environment that gives external signals perceived by the individual while evaluating alternative ways. The findings can possibly be used as a mechanism to manage the consumer choice.


1991 ◽  
Vol 30 (4I) ◽  
pp. 337-365
Author(s):  
Syed Nawab Haider Naqvi

After 40 years of its birth, development economics has come to be widely accepted - without universal acclaim. In sharp contrast to some pessimistic evaluations of the subject, the academic community has granted it the right to a separate existence. But the recognition has not come easy. From the first full-length evaluation of the discipline by Chenery (1965), in which he looks at it as a variation on the classical theme of comparative advantage, to Stem's (1989) sympathetic review of the contributions that the discipline has made to the state of economic knowledge, development economics has experienced many a vicissitude - both the laurels of glory and the "arrows of outrageous fortune". But, finally, it has become an industry in its own right, of which not only social profitability but also 'private' profitability appears to be strictly positive: the publishing industry continues to patronize it and publish full-length books on the subject. Four decades of development experience, the production of massive cross-country and time-series data about a large number of development variables, the construction of large macro-economic models and fast-running computers, and the application of mathematical methods, have all combined to lay the foundations of a theoretically rigorous and policy-relevant development paradigm, which is gradually replacing the old one. All this is good news for development economists, who can now afford not only bread but also some butter for their daily parsnips .


2000 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luigino Bruni ◽  
Robert Sugden

It is a truism that a market economy cannot function without trust. We must be able to rely on other people to respect our property rights, and on our trading partners to keep their promises. The theory of economics is incomplete unless it can explain why economic agents often trust one another, and why that trust is often repaid. There is a long history of work in economics and philosophy which tries to explain the kinds of reasoning that people use when they engage in practices of trust: this work develops theories of trust. A related tradition in economics, sociology and political science investigates the kinds of social institution that reproduce whatever habits, dispositions or modes of reasoning are involved in acts of trust: this work develops theories of social capital. A recurring question in these literatures is whether a society which organizes its economic life through markets is capable of reproducing the trust on which those markets depend. In this paper, we look at these themes in relation to the writings of three eighteenth-century philosopher-economists: David Hume, Adam Smith, and Antonio Genovesi.


2013 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
PHILIP MIROWSKI

This Presidential Address revisits Paul Samuelson’s views on the history of science and history of economics, with the advantage of archival evidence from his papers now deposited at Duke. It suggests he was not impressed with historians in general; but also, that his faith in the orthodox neoclassical profession failed him towards the end of his life, when those in the profession started to treat him the way that he had treated the historians.


2006 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-18
Author(s):  
Gregory S. Kealey

Abstract While the history of the RCMP security service is becoming better known, study of its nineteenth-century predecessors is just beginning. From experiments with a rural police force established in Lower Canada in the aftermath of the 1837 Rebellions, the United Provinces of Canada created two secret police forces in 1864 to protect the border from American invasion. With the end of the Civil War, these forces turned to protecting the Canadas from Fenian activities. The Dominion Police, established in 1868, provided a permanent home for the secret service. The NWMP followed in 1873. Unlike the English, whose Victorian liberalism was suspicious of political and secret police, Canadians appear to have been much more accepting of such organisations and did not challenge John A. Macdonald's creation or control of a secret police. Republicanism, whether in the guise of Quebec, Irish or American nationalism, was seen as antithetical to the new nation of Canada, and a secret police was deemed necessary to protect the nation against it.


2007 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Rousmaniere

Of the many organizational changes that took place in public education in North America at the turn of the last century, few had greater impact on the school than the development of the principal. The creation of the principal's office revolutionized the internal organization of the school from a group of students supervised by one teacher to a collection of teachers managed by one administrator. In its very conception, the appointment of a school-based administrator who was authorized to supervise other teachers significantly restructured power relations in schools, realigning the source of authority from the classroom to the principal's office. Just as significant was the role that the principal played as a school based representative of the central educational office.


Author(s):  
Dmitry Maidachevsky

The author of the article reconstructs the shift, which occurred in the model and disciplinary structure of «commercial» education towards «economic» one. The research is based on disciplinary approach in the history of education, which builds on subject-oriented character of knowledge and empirical analysis of Irkutsk Financial and Economic Institute case. Although the shift was being discreetly prepared for several decades and included many attempts to integrate commercial functions of education with economic field, its real start was caused by external to science and education factors. The subject area of a business economics became the point of intersection for economic and commercial disciplines. The area appeared mainly due to political and ideological campaign aimed at making the enterprises’ party core groups aware of economic knowledge. The 18th All-Union Conference of Communist Party initiated the campaign in 1941. The outbreak of war forced people to view the business economics as a scientific and practical field of study, which applies many techniques and methods of economic analysis in order to ensure effective operation and reveal its potential reserves. After obtaining the right to operate beyond the scientific and practical environment, the subject area of business economics entered the higher education area, transforming its educational and research programs and integrating the disciplinary models and structures of economic and commercial education.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 821-836
Author(s):  
Z. T. Golenkova ◽  
Yu. V. Goliusova ◽  
T. I. Gorina

The article considers the development of self-employment in the contemporary society: the history of its representation in legal norms and practices; the scope of informal employment according to statistical and sociological data; definitions of self-employment in the scientific literature. The self-employed are usually defined as not employed in organizations but independently selling goods and services produced by themselves. The global number of the self-employed grows. The authors present an algorithm for calculating the indicator potential self-employed based on the secondary analysis of the 27th wave of the RLMS (2018), and stress the lack of a unified methodology for calculating informal employment. According to the official data, the number of the self-employed in Russia ranges from several thousands to several millions, which confuses researchers who study this phenomenon. The article focuses on the results of the study Self-Employed: Who Are They? (Moscow, 2019), whose object were not potential but real self-employed selected on the basis of online advertisements of their services in Moscow. The authors collected information with the method of semi-formalized telephone interview. Based on the collected data, the authors make conclusions about motivating and demotivating factors of self-employment: independence, freedom in planning time and activity, distrust in the state, lack of social guarantees, unpredictable legislation, and imperfect tax system. Today, the status of the self-employed in Russia is still unclear and often substitutes the individual entrepreneur status in order to apply for tax preferences.


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