Richard B. McKenzie - A Brain-Focused Foundation for Economic Science
Here you can read online Richard B. McKenzie - A Brain-Focused Foundation for Economic Science full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2018, publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, genre: Science. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:
Romance novel
Science fiction
Adventure
Detective
Science
History
Home and family
Prose
Art
Politics
Computer
Non-fiction
Religion
Business
Children
Humor
Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.
- Book:A Brain-Focused Foundation for Economic Science
- Author:
- Publisher:Palgrave Macmillan
- Genre:
- Year:2018
- Rating:5 / 5
- Favourites:Add to favourites
- Your mark:
A Brain-Focused Foundation for Economic Science: summary, description and annotation
We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "A Brain-Focused Foundation for Economic Science" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.
This book argues that Lionel Robbinss construction of the economics fields organizing cornerstone, scarcityand all that has been derived from it from economists in Robbinss time to todayno longer can generate general consent among economists. Since Robbins Essay, economists have learned more than Robbins and his cohorts could have imagined about human decision making and about the human brain that is the lynchpin of human decision making. This book argues however that behavioral economists and neuroeconomists, in pointing to numerous ways people fall short of perfectly rational decisions (anomalies, biases, and downright errors), have saved conventional economics from such self-contradictions in what could be viewed as a wayward approach. This book posits that the human brain is the ultimate scarce resource, and that a focus on the brain can bring a new foundation for economics and can save the discipline from hostile criticisms from a variety of non-economists (many psychologists).
Richard B. McKenzie: author's other books
Who wrote A Brain-Focused Foundation for Economic Science? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Richard B. McKenzie
Richard B. McKenzie
George F. DeMartino
Charvi Shukla
Professor Steve Keen
Vartanian Oshin
IMinds
Berger Sebastian
Richard H. Thaler
A Brain-Focused Foundation for Economic Science — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work
Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "A Brain-Focused Foundation for Economic Science" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
The Author(s) 2018
Richard B. McKenzie A Brain-Focused Foundation for Economic Science1. Economists Founding Concerns in the History of Economic Thought
Richard B. McKenzie 1
(1)
Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA
Richard B. McKenzie
Email:
Contemporary economists have variously defined their discipline over the two-plus centuries since its intellectual emergence from the work of Adam Smith. However, there is widespread agreement among contemporary economists that the one word that captures the core organizing concern of neoclassical economics is scarcity , which economists almost always interpret to mean the inescapable conflict that occurs when peoples virtually unlimited (and ever-expanding) human wants grounded on subjective, mind-based evaluations (the product of myriad, often unspecified, neurological and physiological and external forces) are pitted against the known but limited or finite resources in the external physical world that are available for satisfying human wants.
The Foundations of Economics, Scarcity , and Analytical Methods
The venerable Paul Samuelson first published his once dominant introductory economics textbook in 1948 without scarcity being the focus of his construction of the discipline, possibly because he was then more concerned with introducing students to the management of the overall level of a countrys aggregate economic activity with the introduction of the then still relatively new Keynesian macroeconomics.
During the first half of the 1960s, Campbell McConnells introductory textbook began to seriously erode Samuelsons market share in part because he adopted Samuelsons model of placing heavy and early emphasis on macroeconomics with microeconomics relegated to the last half of the textbook (taken up usually in the second semester of the then traditional year-long introductory course). Perhaps, McConnells market share was also boosted somewhat by his greater emphasis on the scarcity paradigm as the chief organizing concept for both macroeconomics and microeconomics: Recalling that wants are unlimited and resources are scarce, economics can be defined as the social science concerned with the problem of using or administering scarce resources ( the means of producing ) so as to attain the greatest or maximum fulfillment of our unlimited wants (the goal of producing) (emphasis in the original).
In an even later edition, Samuelson with his adopted co-author William Nordhaus defined economics (which in the 2010s had been in print for nearly seven decades) with greater brevity, as the study of how societies use scarce resources to produce valuable commodities and distribute them among different people.
Again, the conventional construction of scarcity in economics is largely grounded in the boundedness of resources in the external real world in which people must survive (or, as the case might be) prosper and the unboundedness of peoples capacity to imagine things they want and ways to obtain what they want.
In short, scarcity occurs at the intersection of the physical and subjective universes (as economists conceive and limit them). Scarcity also constrains, if not determines (in some tightly constructed mathematical models), peoples decision-making and economists analytics. Scarcity in the external world defines the subject matter of economics, as well as defines and largely guides what and how economists do what they do, as well as teach what they do.
In economists conceived state of nature, not all human wants, obviously, can be satisfied. Choices must be made. Modern economics as a discipline is most often seen as bounded, but only by those arenas in which people have meaningful choices and make decisions among viable options. That is, economics is not generally thought to extend to those realms of human behavior in which people do not have two or more meaningful alternative courses of action, as may be the case after people are lifted into the vortex of a tornado or when they are tightly shackled. Until the advent of sexual reassignment surgeries, economics played no (or a thought-to-be little) role in gender identity matters. People had no choice about their sexual orientation (at least, as once presumed by economists, and almost all other social scientists, in their modeling).
Scarcity implies (or so economists who adopt scarcity as their core concern, founding analytical presumption) that in making choices people will seek to maximize attainment of utility from the fulfillment of wants that, in turn, implies optimum use of resources. Why would people, within the constraints of their volition, do anything less, at least for modeling purposes? The presumption of maximizing behavior implies people have some rational capacity, which is to say that they have some ability to weigh off the relative value of various wants that can be fulfilledand to fulfill with some consistency, within constraints, those wants that have the greatest value.
For Samuelson, McConnell, Mankiw, and a generation of economists who followed textbook writers lead on unlimited wants, scarcity did not extend to the generation of wants (for the most part). Wants are just there, unaffected by anything, or are unaffected by resource constraints, and are, effectively, beyond economists concerns (as Lionel Robbins insisted in the early 1930s was the case, a point I take up in the next chapter).
Modern economists have sometimes parted ways on just how rational people can be in real life from economists who followed the methodological framework laid down in clearest terms by Milton Friedman in the early 1950s. The overwhelming majority of contemporary economists have assumed some variant of perfect rationality , some as a matter of conviction that peoples level of rationality is close enough to perfect rationality that little is lost in descriptiveness in assuming perfect rationality , while others have assumed perfect rationality as a means of easing their analytics, an approach that elevates the importance of testing empirically the accuracy of their theories predictions.
Neoclassical (or mainstream) economists have acknowledged their own and their subjects mental limitations in one important theoretical regard. As Friedman contended, the founding premise of all theories dealing with complex phenomenon must, to one degree or another, be unreal, or not strictly in accord with how people make decisions in the real world. The real world is complex and messy, with what is at any point in time or within any period of time necessarily the consequence of myriad, ongoing, and continually interacting economic and noneconomic variables. The real world is made ever messier by a multitude of humans imposing varying and different evaluations and actions on life in all arenas, not just business.
Understandably, Friedman reasoned that theories could not be complete, or fully descriptive, and, by chance, if a theorist tried to devise a truly complete theory, he or she could not understand or be able to work with it. A complete theory would overtax the limited mental capacities of economists, which is why theories are devised to reduce (or abstract from) complex reality to a manageable form. Understandably, Friedman concludes, as a matter of human mental limitations and scientific necessity, the legitimacy of and justification for this abstraction [that people maximize or act fully rationally or markets are frictionless] must rest ultimately, as with any other abstraction, on the light shed and the power to predict what is yielded by the abstraction.
Economists might as well simplify their analytics as much as possible to facilitate their analyses, and progressively simplify them so long as nothing, or little of consequence, is lost in the insightfulness and accuracy of predictions from the theory. The usefulness of economic analytics is determined by the congruence between theoretical deductions and empirical findings.
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
Similar books «A Brain-Focused Foundation for Economic Science»
Look at similar books to A Brain-Focused Foundation for Economic Science. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.
George F. DeMartino
Charvi Shukla
Professor Steve Keen
Vartanian Oshin
IMinds
Berger Sebastian
Richard H. Thaler
Reviews about «A Brain-Focused Foundation for Economic Science»
Discussion, reviews of the book A Brain-Focused Foundation for Economic Science and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.