The Epistemology of Simulation, Computation, and Dynamics in Economics

Author(s):  
K. Vela Velupillai

In this chapter the spirit of William Petty is the driving force, but it is given new theoret- ical foundations, mainly as a result of developments in the mathematic underpinnings of the tremendous developments in the potentials of computing, especially using digital technology. Computation and simulation have always played a role in economics, whether it be pure economic theory or any variant of applied economics. This tradition can be traced to the vision of Petty, the founding father of political economy as political arithmetic. A running theme is that, increasingly, the development of economic theory seems to go hand in hand with advances in the theory and practice of computing, which is, in turn, a catalyst for the move away from overreliance on any kind of mathematics for the formalization of economic entities that is inconsistent with the mathematical, philosophical, and epistemological foundations of the digital computer.

2000 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-263 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert E. Prasch

The ideal of Political Economy is not unrestricted competition, but competition that is truly free, because controlled by justice and by law. The distinction between freedom and license needs to be preserved in this department of political philosophy. With that distinction clearly maintained, we may still retain, in economics as in politics, our beautiful watchword, liberty (John Bates Clark 1879, p. 167).John Bates Clark has had a formidable impact on the development of economic theory and the theory of income distribution. In addition, Clark's marginal product theory of distribution has often played an instrumental role in the defense of laissez-faire policies. His theory has been used to criticize a wide variety of market interventions, including minimum wage legislation. As a result it is not surprising that Clark's theory of income distribution, and Clark himself, have drawn more than a few critics.


2021 ◽  
pp. 69-72
Author(s):  
Ryan Walter

This Introduction indicates the aim of the two chapters that follow: to illustrate how parliamentary debate provided political economy with its topics of discussion and forms of argument. The particular case studies are the Bullion Controversy and the Corn Laws debate. The first controversy concerned the role of the Bank of England in raising prices through an excessive note issue, and this question came to be examined by writers such as Malthus and Ricardo at an abstract level. But this style of argument was rejected as inappropriate for guiding the deliberations of Parliament in 1810–1811. In relation to the second case, the Corn Laws, c. 1813–1815, the question of whether or not the trade in corn should be free was treated in Parliament as a question requiring casuistical adjudication, a style of argument that Malthus and Ricardo were evidently obliged to adopt, along with other participants. Both topics have traditionally been studied as key moments in the development of economic theory, yet the account developed here suggests that we have typically misread the texts by placing them in unhistorical contexts.


2016 ◽  
pp. 147-154
Author(s):  
S. Bobylev ◽  
V. Faltsman

The article analyzes academician T. S. Khachaturov contribution to the development of economic theory and practice. We name the following areas of his pioneering research and applications: the basic theory of economic growth efficiency, investment efficiency, natural resource and environmental economics, transport economics.


1988 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 121-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph E Stiglitz

[This is a comment on “The Modigliani-Miller Propositions after Thirty Years” by Merton H. Miller in this same issue.] The 1958 paper by Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller has been justly hailed as a landmark in the modern theory of finance. What has not been sufficiently emphasized is the importance of the paper to the development of economic theory and practice. Indeed, it is ironic that a paper which purportedly established that one need not pay any attention to financial structure -- that financial structure was irrelevant -- should have focused economists' attention on finance. Again ironically, some of the most productive responses to the MM results have come from those who did not feel able to accept the conclusion that financial policy is irrelevant. The MM results forced these skeptics to identify which of the assumptions underlying the MM theorem should be modified or rejected. The attention of economists during the past 30 years has focused on four assumptions underlying the model: first, that firms can be identified by “risk class”; second, that individual borrowing can substitute for firm borrowing; third, that investors have full information about the returns of the firm; and fourth -- the importance of which MM themselves recognized -- is that there are no taxes, or at least tax policy does not treat debt and equity differentially. The question has been not so much whether these assumptions are “realistic,” but whether, or under what circumstances, altering these assumptions leads to situations where financial structure does indeed matter.


1987 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-79
Author(s):  
Claude Hébert ◽  
Jean-Pierre Potier

Three quarters of a century after the death of Léon Walras, the founder of the Lausanne School, the Auguste and Léon Walras Center in Lyons has published for the first time his Mélanges d'économie politique et sociale. This volume includes twenty-nine papers, all prepared by Léon Walras, and maps out his theoretical itinerary. It spans works that he wrote in his youth, which were strongly influenced by his father's ideas, and mature works that he devoted to the three fields of pure economics, applied economics, and normative economics. His efforts were part of a lifelong project: the creation of a “scientific, liberal and humanitarian socialism.” The Mélanges reasserts Walras's desire to achieve a synthesis of these three fields that have been separated by too many of his disciples, who have retained only the one devoted to economic theory. The Mélanges plays an important part in the writings of Léon Walras. Initially conceived as containing remnants that had not appeared in the volumes published during Walras's life, it underwent a progressive development due to the succession of papers that he kept adding to it right up until the time of his death. Walras's revisions of the papers; his directions for the publication of the essays; his incorporation of unpublished papers on the teaching of political economy at the end of the nineteenth century; the character of the Mélanges as being a synthesis of the Elements d'économie politique pure, the Etudes d'économie sociale and the Etudes d'économie politique appliquée; and the insertion into the Mélanges of Léon Walras's last articles all make this work a genuine and important scientific testament.


2018 ◽  
pp. 95-110
Author(s):  
L. D. Shirokorad

This article shows how representatives of various theoretical currents in economics at different times in history interpreted the efforts of Nikolay Sieber in defending and developing Marxian economic theory and assessed his legacy and role in forming the Marxist school in Russian political economy. The article defines three stages in this process: publication of Sieber’s work dedicated to the analysis of the first volume of Marx’s Das Kapital and criticism of it by Russian opponents of Marxian economic theory; assessment of Sieber’s work by the narodniks, “Legal Marxists”, Georgiy Plekhanov, and Vladimir Lenin; the decline in interest in Sieber in light of the growing tendency towards an “organic synthesis” of the theory of marginal utility and the Marxist social viewpoint.


2017 ◽  
pp. 128-141
Author(s):  
N. Ranneva

The present article undertakes a critical review of the new book of Jean Tirole, the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Economics, “The theory of cor- porate finance”, which has recently been published in Russian. The book makes a real contribution to the profession by summarizing the whole field of corporate finance and bringing together a big body of research developed over the last thirty years. By simplifying modeling, using unified analytical apparatus, undertaking reinterpretation of many previously received results, and structuring the material in original way Tirole achieves a necessary unity and simplicity in exposition of extremely heterogeneous theoretical and empirical material. The book integrates the new institutional economic theory into classical corporate finance theory and by doing so contributes to making a new type of textbook, which is quite on time and is likely to become essential reading for all graduate students in corporate finance and microeconomics and for everyone interested in these disciplines.


2005 ◽  
pp. 36-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Buzgalin ◽  
A. Kolganov

The limited ability of neoclassical "mainstream" to explain deep fundamental shifts in economic structures of the present day world determines the renaissance of alternative schools of economic theory, including Marxism. The article is aimed to show theoretical concepts of modern Russian neomarxism, which has a potential to explain the contradictions of the capitalist globalization, the tendencies of forming new types of socioeconomic relations, of the specific forms of transition economies in the post-socialist countries and basic causes of the birth and collapse of the socialist system.


2019 ◽  
pp. 135-145
Author(s):  
Viktor A. Popov

Deep comprehension of the advanced economic theory, the talent of lecturer enforced by the outstanding working ability forwarded Vladimir Geleznoff scarcely at the end of his thirties to prepare the publication of “The essays of the political economy” (1898). The subsequent publishing success (8 editions in Russia, the 1918­-year edition in Germany) sufficiently demonstrates that Geleznoff well succeded in meeting the intellectual inquiry of the cross­road epoch of the Russian history and by that taking the worthful place in the history of economic thought in Russia. Being an acknowledged historian of science V. Geleznoff was the first and up to now one of the few to demonstrate the worldwide community of economists the theoretically saturated view of Russian economic thought in its most fruitful period (end of XIX — first quarter of XX century).


2019 ◽  
pp. 74-98
Author(s):  
A.B. Lyubinin

Review of the monograph indicated in the subtitle V.T. Ryazanov. The reviewer is critical of the position of the author of the book, believing that it is possible and even necessary (to increase the effectiveness of General economic theory and bring it closer to practice) substantial (and not just formal-conventional) synthesis of the Marxist system of political economy with its non-Marxist systems. The article emphasizes the difference between the subject and the method of the classical, including Marxist, school of political economy with its characteristic objective perception of the subject from the neoclassical school with its reduction of objective reality to subjective assessments; this excludes their meaningful synthesis as part of a single «modern political economy». V.T. Ryazanov’s interpretation of commodity production in the economic system of «Capital» of K. Marx as a purely mental abstraction, in fact — a fiction, myth is also counter-argued. On the issue of identification of the discipline «national economy», the reviewer, unlike the author of the book, takes the position that it is a concrete economic science that does not have a political economic status.


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