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Economics
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Economics is a social science concerned chiefly with description and analysis of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work, consistent with this focus, textbooks often distinguish between microeconomics and macroeconomics. Microeconomics examines the behaviour of elements in the economy, including individual agents and markets, their interactions. Individual agents may include, for example, households, firms, buyers, macroeconomics analyzes the entire economy and issues affecting it, including unemployment of resources, inflation, economic growth, and the public policies that address these issues. Economic analysis can be applied throughout society, as in business, finance, health care, Economic analyses may also be applied to such diverse subjects as crime, education, the family, law, politics, religion, social institutions, war, science, and the environment. At the turn of the 21st century, the domain of economics in the social sciences has been described as economic imperialism. The ultimate goal of economics is to improve the conditions of people in their everyday life. There are a variety of definitions of economics. Some of the differences may reflect evolving views of the subject or different views among economists, to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue for the publick services. Say, distinguishing the subject from its uses, defines it as the science of production, distribution. On the satirical side, Thomas Carlyle coined the dismal science as an epithet for classical economics, in this context and it enquires how he gets his income and how he uses it. Thus, it is on the one side, the study of wealth and on the other and more important side, a part of the study of man. He affirmed that previous economists have usually centred their studies on the analysis of wealth, how wealth is created, distributed, and consumed, but he said that economics can be used to study other things, such as war, that are outside its usual focus. This is because war has as the goal winning it, generates both cost and benefits, and, resources are used to attain the goal. If the war is not winnable or if the costs outweigh the benefits. Some subsequent comments criticized the definition as overly broad in failing to limit its subject matter to analysis of markets, there are other criticisms as well, such as in scarcity not accounting for the macroeconomics of high unemployment. The same source reviews a range of included in principles of economics textbooks. Among economists more generally, it argues that a particular definition presented may reflect the direction toward which the author believes economics is evolving, microeconomics examines how entities, forming a market structure, interact within a market to create a market system
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Consumption (economics)
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Consumption is major concept in economics and is also studied by many other social sciences. Economists are particularly interested in the relationship between consumption and income, as modeled with the consumption function, different schools of economists define production and consumption differently. Other economists define consumption much more broadly, as the aggregate of all activity that does not entail the design, production and marketing of goods. The consumption function is a function that expresses consumer spending in terms of its determinants, such as income. The Keynesian consumption function is known as the absolute income hypothesis, as it only bases consumption on current income. Criticism of this led to the development of Milton Friedmans permanent income hypothesis. Consumption is defined in part by comparison to production, in the tradition of the Columbia School of Household Economics, also known as the New Home Economics, commercial consumption has to be analyzed in the context of household production. The opportunity cost of time affects the cost of home-produced substitutes and therefore demand for commercial goods, the elasticity of demand for consumption goods is also a function of who performs chores in households and how their spouses compensate them for opportunity costs of home production. Different schools of economists define production and consumption differently, other economists define consumption much more broadly, as the aggregate of all economic activity that does not entail the design, production and marketing of goods and services. Consumption can also be measured by a variety of different ways such as energy in energy economics metrics, aggregate consumption is a component of aggregate demand. According to the UN, today’s consumption is undermining the environmental resource base, and the dynamics of the consumption-poverty-inequality-environment nexus are accelerating. Developing countries like India, as they move down the path of copying the consumption patterns of developed economies, some economists talk about putting a price on using earths resources which is in addition to the cost of just extracting them. Die Broke is a similar idea, distinction, A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. The World of Goods, Towards an Anthropology of Consumption, ivanova, Diana, Stadler, Konstantin, Steen-Olsen, Kjartan, Wood, Richard, Vita, Gibran, Tukker, Arnold, Hertwich, Edgar G. Environmental Impact Assessment of Household Consumption. An essay examining the strengths and weaknesses of Keyness theory of consumption
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Production (economics)
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Production theory is the study of production, or the economic process of converting inputs into outputs. Production uses resources to create a good or service that is suitable for use, gift-giving in a gift economy and this can include manufacturing, construction, storing, shipping, and packaging. Some economists define production broadly as all economic activity other than consumption and they see every commercial activity other than the final purchase as some form of production. Production is a process, and as such it occurs through time, because it is a flow concept, production is measured as a “rate of output per period of time”. Production is a process that combines various material inputs and immaterial inputs to make something for consumption and it is the act of creating output, a good or service that has value and contributes to the utility of individuals. Economic well-being is created in a process, meaning all economic activities that aim directly or indirectly to satisfy human needs. The degree to which the needs are satisfied is often accepted as a measure of economic well-being, in production, two features explain increasing economic well-being. They are improving quality-price-ratio of commodities and increasing incomes from growing, all of them produce commodities that have value and contribute to well-being of individuals. The satisfaction of needs originates from the use of the commodities produced, the need satisfaction increases when the quality-price-ratio of the commodities improves and more satisfaction is achieved at less cost. To the procucer, improving product competitiveness often means lower product prices, and therefore losses in incomes, Economic well-being also increases due to the growth of incomes that are gained from the growing and more efficient market production. Market production is the one production form that creates and distributes incomes to stakeholders. Public production and household production are financed by the incomes generated in market production, thus market production has a double role in creating well-being, i. e. the role of producing developing commodities and the role to creating income. Because of this double role market production is the “primus motor” of economic well-being, in principle there are two main activities in an economy, production and consumption. Similarly there are two kinds of actors, producers and consumers, well-being is made possible by efficient production and by the interaction between producers and consumers. In the interaction, consumers can be identified in two roles both of which generate well-being, consumers can be both customers of the producers and suppliers to the producers. Stakeholders of production are persons, groups or organizations with an interest in a producing company, Economic well-being originates in efficient production and it is distributed through the interaction between the company’s stakeholders. Stakeholders of companies are economic actors with an economic interest in a company, based on the similarities of their interests, stakeholders can be classified into three groups to differentiate their interests and mutual relations. The three groups are, Customers Suppliers Producers The interests of stakeholders and their relations to companies are described briefly below
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Behavioral economics
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Risk tolerance is a crucial factor in personal financial decision making. Risk tolerance is defined as individuals willingness to engage in a financial activity whose outcome is uncertain, Behavioral economics is primarily concerned with the bounds of rationality of economic agents. Behavioral models typically integrate insights from psychology, neuroscience and microeconomic theory, in so doing, these behavioral models cover a range of concepts, methods, the study of behavioral economics includes how market decisions are made and the mechanisms that drive public choice. The use of the term behavioral economics in U. S. scholarly papers has increased in the past few years, there are three prevalent themes in behavioral finances, Heuristics, People often make decisions based on approximate rules of thumb and not strict logic. Framing, The collection of anecdotes and stereotypes that make up the mental emotional filters individuals rely on to understand and respond to events, Market inefficiencies, These include mis-pricings and non-rational decision making. During the classical period of economics, microeconomics was closely linked to psychology and they developed the concept of homo economicus, whose psychology was fundamentally rational. However, many important neo-classical economists employed more sophisticated psychological explanations, including Francis Edgeworth, Vilfredo Pareto, Economic psychology emerged in the 20th century in the works of Gabriel Tarde, George Katona, and Laszlo Garai. Expected utility and discounted utility models began to gain acceptance, generating testable hypotheses about decision-making given uncertainty and intertemporal consumption, in the 1960s cognitive psychology began to shed more light on the brain as an information processing device. In mathematical psychology, there is a longstanding interest in the transitivity of preference, prospect theory has two stages, an editing stage and an evaluation stage. In the editing stage, risky situations are simplified using various heuristics of choice, outcomes are then compared to the reference point and classified as gains if greater than the reference point and losses if less than the reference point. Loss aversion, Losses bite more than equivalent gains, in their 1979 paper published in Econometrica, Kahneman and Tversky found the median coefficient of loss aversion to be about 2.25, i. e. losses bite about 2.25 times more than equivalent gains. Prospect theory is able to explain everything that the two main existing decision theories—expected utility theory and rank dependent utility theory—can explain, prospect theory has been used to explain a range of phenomena that existing decision theories have great difficulty in explaining. These include backward bending labor supply curves, asymmetric price elasticities, tax evasion, co-movement of stock prices and consumption, in 1992, in the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Kahneman and Tversky gave their revised account of prospect theory that they called cumulative prospect theory. The new theory eliminated the editing phase in prospect theory and focused just on the evaluation phase and its main feature was that it allowed for non-linear probability weighting in a cumulative manner, which was originally suggested in John Quiggins rank dependent utility theory. Psychological traits such as overconfidence, projection bias, and the effects of limited attention are now part of the theory, Behavioral economics has also been applied to intertemporal choice. Intertemporal choice is defined as making a decision and having the effects of such decision happening in a different time, hyperbolic discounting describes the tendency to discount outcomes in the near future more than for outcomes in the far future. Other branches of behavioral economics enrich the model of the utility function without implying inconsistency in preferences, ernst Fehr, Armin Falk, and Matthew Rabin studied fairness, inequity aversion, and reciprocal altruism, weakening the neoclassical assumption of perfect selfishness. This work is particularly applicable to wage setting, Behavioral economics caught on among the general public with the success of books such as Dan Arielys Predictably Irrational
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Cognitive biases
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A cognitive bias refers to the systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment, whereby inferences about other people and situations may be drawn in an illogical fashion. Individuals create their own subjective social reality from their perception of the input, an individuals construction of social reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behaviour in the social world. Thus, cognitive biases may lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation. Some cognitive biases are presumably adaptive, Cognitive biases may lead to more effective actions in a given context. Furthermore, cognitive biases enable faster decisions when timeliness is more valuable than accuracy, other cognitive biases are a by-product of human processing limitations, resulting from a lack of appropriate mental mechanisms, or simply from a limited capacity for information processing. Kahneman and Tversky argue that cognitive biases have efficient practical implications for areas including clinical judgment, entrepreneurship, finance, Bias arises from various processes that are sometimes difficult to distinguish. Tversky, Kahneman and colleagues demonstrated several replicable ways in which human judgments, Tversky and Kahneman explained human differences in judgement and decision making in terms of heuristics. Heuristics involve mental shortcuts which provide swift estimates about the possibility of uncertain occurrences, heuristics are simple for the brain to compute but sometimes introduce severe and systematic errors. For example, the heuristic is defined as the tendency to judge the frequency or likelihood of an occurrence by the extent of which the event resembles the typical case. The Linda Problem illustrates the representativeness heuristic, participants were given a description of Linda that suggests Linda might well be a feminist. They were then asked whether they thought Linda was more likely to be a bank teller or a bank teller, the representativeness heuristic may lead to errors such as activating stereotypes and inaccurate judgements of others. Biases can be distinguished on a number of dimensions, for example, there are biases specific to groups as well as biases at the individual level. Some biases affect decision-making, where the desirability of options has to be considered, others such as illusory correlation affect judgment of how likely something is, or of whether one thing is the cause of another. A distinctive class of biases affect memory, such as consistency bias, some biases reflect a subjects motivation, for example, the desire for a positive self-image leading to egocentric bias and the avoidance of unpleasant cognitive dissonance. Other biases are due to the way the brain perceives. This distinction is sometimes described as hot cognition versus cold cognition, there are also biases in how subjects evaluate in-groups or out-groups, evaluating in-groups as more diverse and better in many respects, even when those groups are arbitrarily-defined. Some cognitive biases belong to the subgroup of attentional biases which refer to the paying of increased attention to certain stimuli and it has been shown, for example, that people addicted to alcohol and other drugs pay more attention to drug-related stimuli. Common psychological tests to measure those biases are the Stroop task, many social institutions rely on individuals to make rational judgments
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Cooperation
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Cooperation is the process of groups of organisms working or acting together for common or mutual benefit, as opposed to working in competition for selfish benefit. Many animal and plant species cooperate both with members of their own species and with members of other species. Language allows humans to cooperate on a large scale. Certain studies have suggested that fairness affects human cooperation, individuals are willing to punish at their own cost if they believe that they are being treated unfairly. Sanfey, et al. conducted an experiment where 19 individuals were scanned using MRI while playing a game in the role of the responder. They received offers from human partners and from a computer partner. Responders refused unfair offers from human partners at a higher rate than those from a computer partner. The experiment also suggested that altruistic punishment is associated with emotions that are generated in unfair situations by the anterior insula of the brain. It has been observed that image scoring promotes cooperative behavior in situations where direct reciprocity is unlikely, in situations where reputation and status are involved, humans tend to cooperate more. This behavior appears, however, to occur mostly between relatives, spending time and resources assisting a related individual may at first seem destructive to the organism’s chances of survival but is actually beneficial over the long-term. Some researchers assert that cooperation is more complex than this and they maintain that helpers may receive more direct, and less indirect, gains from assisting others than is commonly reported. Furthermore, they insist that cooperation may not solely be an interaction between two individuals but may be part of the goal of unifying populations. One specific form of cooperation in animals is kin selection, which can be defined as animals helping to rear a relative’s offspring in order to enhance their own fitness, different theories explaining kin selection have been proposed, including the pay-to-stay and territory inheritance hypotheses. The pay-to-stay theory suggests that individuals help others rear offspring in order to return the favor of the breeders allowing them to live on their land, the territory inheritance theory contends that individuals help in order to have improved access to breeding areas once the breeders depart. These two hypotheses both appear to be valid, at least in cichlid fish, studies conducted on red wolves support previous researchers contention that helpers obtain both immediate and long-term gains from cooperative breeding. Researchers evaluated the consequences of red wolves’ decisions to stay with their packs for extended periods of time after birth and it was found that this delayed dispersal, while it involved helping other wolves rear their offspring, extended male wolves’ life spans. These findings suggest that kin selection may not only benefit an individual in the long-term in terms of increased fitness, some research even suggests that certain species provide more help to the individuals with which they are more closely related. This phenomenon is known as kin discrimination and they found that different species exhibited varying degrees of kin discrimination, with the largest frequencies occurring among those who have the most to gain from cooperative interactions
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Game theory
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Game theory is the study of mathematical models of conflict and cooperation between intelligent rational decision-makers. Game theory is used in economics, political science, and psychology, as well as logic, computer science. Originally, it addressed zero-sum games, in one persons gains result in losses for the other participants. Today, game theory applies to a range of behavioral relations, and is now an umbrella term for the science of logical decision making in humans, animals. Modern game theory began with the idea regarding the existence of equilibria in two-person zero-sum games. Von Neumanns original proof used Brouwer fixed-point theorem on continuous mappings into compact convex sets and his paper was followed by the 1944 book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, co-written with Oskar Morgenstern, which considered cooperative games of several players. The second edition of this provided an axiomatic theory of expected utility. This theory was developed extensively in the 1950s by many scholars, Game theory was later explicitly applied to biology in the 1970s, although similar developments go back at least as far as the 1930s. Game theory has been recognized as an important tool in many fields. With the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences going to game theorist Jean Tirole in 2014, John Maynard Smith was awarded the Crafoord Prize for his application of game theory to biology. Early discussions of examples of two-person games occurred long before the rise of modern, the first known discussion of game theory occurred in a letter written by Charles Waldegrave, an active Jacobite, and uncle to James Waldegrave, a British diplomat, in 1713. In this letter, Waldegrave provides a mixed strategy solution to a two-person version of the card game le Her. James Madison made what we now recognize as an analysis of the ways states can be expected to behave under different systems of taxation. In 1913 Ernst Zermelo published Über eine Anwendung der Mengenlehre auf die Theorie des Schachspiels and it proved that the optimal chess strategy is strictly determined. This paved the way for more general theorems, the Danish mathematician Zeuthen proved that the mathematical model had a winning strategy by using Brouwers fixed point theorem. In his 1938 book Applications aux Jeux de Hasard and earlier notes, Borel conjectured that non-existence of mixed-strategy equilibria in two-person zero-sum games would occur, a conjecture that was proved false. Game theory did not really exist as a field until John von Neumann published a paper in 1928. Von Neumanns original proof used Brouwers fixed-point theorem on continuous mappings into compact convex sets and his paper was followed by his 1944 book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior co-authored with Oskar Morgenstern
8.
John Stuart Mill
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John Stuart Mill was an English philosopher, political economist and civil servant. One of the most influential thinkers in the history of liberalism, he contributed widely to social theory, political theory, Mill was a proponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by his predecessor Jeremy Bentham, and contributed significantly to the theory of the scientific method. A member of the Liberal Party, he was also the first Member of Parliament to call for womens suffrage. John Stuart Mill was born on Rodney Street in the Pentonville area of London, the eldest son of the Scottish philosopher, historian and economist James Mill, John Stuart was educated by his father, with the advice and assistance of Jeremy Bentham and Francis Place. He was given a rigorous upbringing, and was deliberately shielded from association with children his own age other than his siblings. Mill was a precocious child. He describes his education in his autobiography, at the age of three he was taught Greek. By the age of eight, he had read Aesops Fables, Xenophons Anabasis, and the whole of Herodotus and he had also read a great deal of history in English and had been taught arithmetic, physics and astronomy. At the age of eight, Mill began studying Latin, the works of Euclid, and algebra and his main reading was still history, but he went through all the commonly taught Latin and Greek authors and by the age of ten could read Plato and Demosthenes with ease. His father also thought that it was important for Mill to study, one of Mills earliest poetic compositions was a continuation of the Iliad. In his spare time he enjoyed reading about natural sciences and popular novels, such as Don Quixote. In the following year he was introduced to political economy and studied Adam Smith and David Ricardo with his father, Ricardo, who was a close friend of his father, used to invite the young Mill to his house for a walk in order to talk about political economy. At the age of fourteen, Mill stayed a year in France with the family of Sir Samuel Bentham, the mountain scenery he saw led to a lifelong taste for mountain landscapes. The lively and friendly way of life of the French also left an impression on him. In Montpellier, he attended the courses on chemistry, zoology, logic of the Faculté des Sciences. While coming and going from France, he stayed in Paris for a few days in the house of the renowned economist Jean-Baptiste Say, there he met many leaders of the Liberal party, as well as other notable Parisians, including Henri Saint-Simon. Mill went through months of sadness and pondered suicide at twenty years of age, according to the opening paragraphs of Chapter V of his autobiography, he had asked himself whether the creation of a just society, his lifes objective, would actually make him happy. His heart answered no, and unsurprisingly he lost the happiness of striving towards this objective, eventually, the poetry of William Wordsworth showed him that beauty generates compassion for others and stimulates joy
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Adam Smith
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Adam Smith FRSA was a Scottish economist, philosopher, and author. He was a philosopher, a pioneer of political economy. He is best known for two works, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and An Inquiry into the Nature. The latter, usually abbreviated as The Wealth of Nations, is considered his magnum opus and the first modern work of economics. Smith studied social philosophy at the University of Glasgow and at Balliol College, Oxford, after graduating, he delivered a successful series of public lectures at Edinburgh, leading him to collaborate with David Hume during the Scottish Enlightenment. Smith obtained a professorship at Glasgow teaching moral philosophy, and during this time he wrote, in his later life, he took a tutoring position that allowed him to travel throughout Europe, where he met other intellectual leaders of his day. Smith laid the foundations of free market economic theory. The Wealth of Nations was a precursor to the academic discipline of economics. In this and other works, he developed the concept of division of labour, Smith was controversial in his own day and his general approach and writing style were often satirised by Tory writers in the moralising tradition of William Hogarth and Jonathan Swift. In 2005, The Wealth of Nations was named among the 100 Best Scottish Books of all time, the minor planet 12838 Adamsmith was named in his memory. Smith was born in Kirkcaldy, in the County of Fife and his father, also Adam Smith, was a Scottish Writer to the Signet, advocate, and prosecutor and also served as comptroller of the Customs in Kirkcaldy. In 1720 he married Margaret Douglas, daughter of the landed Robert Douglas of Strathendry and his father died two months after he was born, leaving his mother a widow. The date of Smiths baptism into the Church of Scotland at Kirkcaldy was 5 June 1723, and this has often been treated as if it were also his date of birth, Smith was close to his mother, who probably encouraged him to pursue his scholarly ambitions. He attended the Burgh School of Kirkcaldy—characterised by Rae as one of the best secondary schools of Scotland at that period—from 1729 to 1737, he learned Latin, mathematics, history, Smith entered the University of Glasgow when he was fourteen and studied moral philosophy under Francis Hutcheson. Here, Smith developed his passion for liberty, reason, in 1740 Smith was the graduate scholar presented to undertake postgraduate studies at Balliol College, Oxford, under the Snell Exhibition. Adam Smith considered the teaching at Glasgow to be far superior to that at Oxford, according to William Robert Scott, The Oxford of time gave little if any help towards what was to be his lifework. Nevertheless, Smith took the opportunity while at Oxford to teach several subjects by reading many books from the shelves of the large Bodleian Library. When Smith was not studying on his own, his time at Oxford was not a happy one, near the end of his time there, Smith began suffering from shaking fits, probably the symptoms of a nervous breakdown
10.
David Ricardo
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David Ricardo was a British political economist. He was one of the most influential of the economists, along with Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith. Born in London, England, Ricardo was the third of 17 children of a Sephardic Jewish family of Portuguese origin who had relocated from the Dutch Republic. His father, Abraham Ricardo, was a successful stockbroker and he began working with his father at the age of 14. At age 21, Ricardo eloped with a Quaker, Priscilla Anne Wilkinson and this religious difference resulted in estrangement from his family, and he was led to adopt a position of independence. His father disowned him and his mother never spoke to him again. Following this estrangement he went into business for himself with the support of Lubbocks and Forster and he made the bulk of his fortune as a result of speculation on the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo. Prior to the battle, Ricardo posted an observer to convey early results of the outcome and he then deliberately created the mistaken impression the French had won by initially openly selling British securities. Following this panic he moved to buy British securities at a steep discount, the Sunday Times reported in Ricardo’s obituary, published on 14 September 1823, that during the Battle of Waterloo Ricardo netted upwards of a million sterling, a huge sum at the time. He was appointed High Sheriff of Gloucestershire for 1818–19, in August 1818 he bought Lord Portarlington’s seat in Parliament for £4,000, as part of the terms of a loan of £25,000. His record in Parliament was that of an earnest reformer and he held the seat until his death four years later. Ricardo was a friend of James Mill. Other notable friends included Jeremy Bentham and Thomas Malthus, with whom Ricardo had a debate over such things as the role of landowners in a society. He also was a member of Malthus Political Economy Club, and he was one of the original members of The Geological Society. His sister was author Sarah Ricardo-Porter and he voted with opposition in support of the liberal movements in Naples,21 Feb. and Sicily,21 June, and for inquiry into the administration of justice in Tobago,6 June. He divided for repeal of the Blasphemous and Seditious Libels Act,8 May, inquiry into the Peterloo massacre,16 May and he adamantly supported the implementation of free trade. He voted against renewal of the duties,9 Feb. He voted silently for parliamentary reform,25 Apr.3 June and he again voted for criminal law reform,4 June
11.
The Wealth of Nations
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First published in 1776, the book offers one of the worlds first collected descriptions of what builds nations wealth, and is today a fundamental work in classical economics. By reflecting upon the economics at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the touches upon such broad topics as the division of labour, productivity. An important theme that persists throughout the work is the idea that the system is automatic, and. This is often referred to as the “invisible hand, the Wealth of Nations was published 9 March 1776, during the Scottish Enlightenment and the Scottish Agricultural Revolution. It influenced a number of authors and economists, as well as governments, for example, Alexander Hamilton was influenced in part by The Wealth of Nations to write his Report on Manufactures, in which he argued against many of Smiths policies. Interestingly, Hamilton based much of this report on the ideas of Jean-Baptiste Colbert and it provided the foundation for new economists, politicians, mathematicians, biologists, and thinkers of all fields to build upon. Five editions of The Wealth of Nations were published during Smiths lifetime, in 1776,1778,1784,1786, numerous editions appeared after Smiths death in 1790. To better understand the evolution of the work under Smiths hand, the differences were published along with an edited sixth edition in 1904. They found minor but numerous differences between the first and the editions, both of which were published in two volumes. Among other things, the Additions and Corrections included entirely new sections, finally, Cannan notes only trivial differences between the fourth and fifth editions – a set of misprints being removed from the fourth and a different set of misprints being introduced. The first edition of the sold out in six months. Strahan also wrote, What you say of Mr. Gibbons, gibbon wrote to Adam Ferguson on 1 April, What an excellent work is that with which our common friend Mr. Adam Smith has enriched the public. An extensive science in a book, and the most profound ideas expressed in the most perspicuous language. The review of the book in the Annual Register was probably written by Whig MP Edmund Burke, Smiths biographer John Rae contends that The Wealth of Nations shaped government policy soon after it was published. In 1777 the Prime Minister, Lord North, in the first budget after the book was published, the budget of 1778 introduced the inhabited house duty and the malt tax, both recommended by Smith. In 1779 Smith was consulted by politicians Henry Dundas and Lord Carlisle on the subject of giving Ireland free trade, in that book it was stated that the only way to become rich was to manage matters so as to make ones income exceed ones expenses. This maxim applied equally to an individual and to a nation, the proper line of conduct therefore was by a well-directed economy to retrench every current expense, and to make as large a saving during the peace as possible. In 1796 when Fox was dining with Lord Lauderdale, Lauderdale remarked that they knew nothing of political economy before Adam Smith wrote, pooh, replied Fox, your Adam Smiths are nothing, but that is his love, we must spare him there
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Politics (Aristotle)
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Politics is a work of political philosophy by Aristotle, a 4th-century BC Greek philosopher. The title of the Politics literally means the things concerning the polis, Aristotles Politics is divided into eight books which are each further divided into chapters. Citations of this work, as with the rest of the works of Aristotle, are made by referring to the Bekker section numbers. Politics spans the Bekker sections 1252a to 1342b, in the first book, Aristotle discusses the city or political community as opposed to other types of communities and partnerships such as the household and village. The highest form of community is the polis, Aristotle comes to this conclusion because he believes the public life is far more virtuous than the private and because men are political animals. He begins with the relationship between the city and man, and then discusses the household. He takes issue with the view that political rule, kingly rule, rule over slaves and he then examines in what way the city may be said to be natural. Aristotle discusses the parts of the household, which includes slaves, leading to a discussion of slavery can ever be just and better for the person enslaved or is always unjust. He distinguishes between those who are slaves because the law says they are and those who are slaves by nature, some scholars have therefore concluded that the qualifications for natural slavery preclude the existence of such a being. Aristotle then moves to the question of property in general, arguing that the acquisition of property does not form a part of household management and criticizing those who take it too seriously. It is necessary, but that does not make it a part of household management any more than it makes medicine a part of household management just because health is necessary. Book I concludes with Aristotles assertion that the object of household rule is the virtuous character of ones wife and children. Rule over the slaves is despotic, rule over children kingly, Book II examines various views concerning the best regime. It opens with an analysis of the regime presented in Platos Republic before moving to that presented in Platos Laws, Aristotle then discusses the systems presented by two other philosophers, Phaleas of Chalcedon and Hippodamus of Miletus. After addressing regimes invented by theorists, Aristotle moves to the examination of three regimes that are held to be well managed. These are the Spartan, Cretan, and Carthaginian, the book concludes with some observations on regimes and legislators. But in practice a citizen is defined to be one of both the parents are citizens, others insist on going further back, say two or three or more grandparents. Aristotle asserts that a citizen is anyone who can take part in the governmental process and he finds that most people in the polis are capable of being citizens
13.
Francis Ysidro Edgeworth
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Francis Ysidro Edgeworth FBA was an Anglo-Irish philosopher and political economist who made significant contributions to the methods of statistics during the 1880s. From 1891 onward he was appointed the editor of The Economic Journal. Edgeworth was born in Edgeworthstown, County Longford, Ireland and he did not attend school, but was educated by private tutors at the Edgeworthstown estate until he reached the age to enter university. One of the outcomes of their marriage was Ysidro Francis Edgeworth, richard Lovell Edgeworth was his grandfather, and the writer Maria Edgeworth his aunt. As a student at Trinity College, Dublin, and Balliol College, Oxford, Edgeworth studied ancient, a voracious autodidact, he studied mathematics and economics only after he had completed university. He qualified as a barrister in London in 1877 but did not practise, also in 1891 he was appointed the founding editor of The Economic Journal. He continued as editor or joint-editor until his death 35 years later, Edgeworth was a highly influential figure in the development of neo-classical economics. He was the first to apply certain formal mathematical techniques to individual decision making in economics and he developed utility theory, introducing the indifference curve and the famous Edgeworth box, which is now familiar to undergraduate students of microeconomics. He is also known for the Edgeworth conjecture, which states that the core of an economy shrinks to the set of competitive equilibria as the number of agents in the economy gets large, in statistics, Edgeworth is most prominently remembered by having his name on the Edgeworth series. The book was difficult to read. He frequently referenced literary sources and interspersed the writing with passages in a number of languages, including Latin, French, the mathematics was similarly difficult, and a number of his creative applications of mathematics to economic or moral issues would be judged as incomprehensible. His readers may wish that he had kept his work by him a little longer till he had worked it out a little more fully. But taking it as what it claims to be, a study, we can only admire its brilliancy, force. Edgeworths close friend, William Stanley Jevons, said of Mathematical Psychics, Whatever else readers of this book may think about it, there can be no doubt that in the style of his composition Mr. Edgeworth does not do justice to his matter. His style, if not obscure, is implicit, so that the reader is left to puzzle out every important sentence like an enigma, the Royal Statistical Society awarded him the Guy Medal in 1907. Edgeworth served as the president of the Royal Statistical Society, 1912–14, in 1928, Arthur Lyon Bowley published a book entitled and devoted to F. Y. Edgeworths range of final settlements was later resurrected by Martin Shubik as the concept of the core. Edgeworths conjecture As the number of agents in an economy increases, in the limit case of an infinite number of agents, contract becomes fully determinate and identical to the equilibrium of economists
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William Stanley Jevons
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William Stanley Jevons FRS was an English economist and logician. Irving Fisher described Jevons book A General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy as the start of the method in economics. It made the case that economics as a science concerned with quantities is necessarily mathematical, in so doing, it expounded upon the final utility theory of value. Jevons work, along with similar discoveries made by Carl Menger in Vienna and by Léon Walras in Switzerland, Jevons contribution to the marginal revolution in economics in the late 19th century established his reputation as a leading political economist and logician of the time. Jevons broke off his studies of the sciences in London in 1854 to work as an assayer in Sydney. Returning to the UK in 1859, he published General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy in 1862, outlining the marginal utility theory of value, and A Serious Fall in the Value of Gold in 1863. The most important of his works on logic and scientific methods is his Principles of Science, as well as The Theory of Political Economy, among his inventions was the logic piano, a mechanical computer. Jevons was born in Liverpool, Lancashire, England and his father, Thomas Jevons, a man of strong scientific tastes and a writer on legal and economic subjects, was an iron merchant. His mother Mary Anne Jevons was the daughter of William Roscoe, at the age of fifteen he was sent to London to attend the University College School. The idea of leaving the UK was distasteful, but pecuniary considerations had, in consequence of the failure of his fathers firm in 1847, become of vital importance, Jevons left the UK for Sydney in June 1854 to take up a role as an Assayer at the Mint. Jevons lived with his colleague and his wife first at Church Hill, then in Annangrove at Petersham, in letters to his family he described his life, took photographs and produced a social map of Sydney. Jevons returned to England via America five years later, not long after taking his M. A. degree Jevons obtained a post as tutor at Owens College, Manchester. In 1866 he was elected professor of logic and mental and moral philosophy, next year he married Harriet Ann Taylor, whose father, John Edward Taylor, had been the founder and proprietor of the Manchester Guardian. Jevons suffered a good deal from ill health and sleeplessness, in 1876 he was glad to exchange the Owens professorship for the professorship of political economy in University College, London. Travelling and music were the principal recreations of his life, but his continued to be bad. He found his professorial duties increasingly irksome, and feeling that the pressure of work left him no spare energy. On 13 August 1882 he drowned whilst bathing near Hastings, Jevons was a prolific writer, and at the time of his death was a leader in the UK both as a logician and as an economist. Alfred Marshall said of his work in economics that it will probably be found to have more constructive force than any, save that of Ricardo, Stanley Jevons was brought up a Christian Unitarian, and excerpts from his journals indicate he remained committed to his Christian beliefs until death
15.
Vilfredo Pareto
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Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto was an Italian engineer, sociologist, economist, political scientist, and philosopher, now also known for the 80/20 rule, named after him as the Pareto principle. He made several important contributions to economics, particularly in the study of income distribution and he was also responsible for popularising the use of the term elite in social analysis. He introduced the concept of Pareto efficiency and helped develop the field of microeconomics and he was also the first to discover that income follows a Pareto distribution, which is a power law probability distribution. The Pareto principle was named after him, and it was built on observations of his such as that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by about 20% of the population. He also contributed to the fields of sociology and mathematics, according to the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard L. Hudson, His legacy as an economist was profound. Partly because of him, the field evolved from a branch of philosophy as practised by Adam Smith into a data intensive field of scientific research. His books look more like modern economics than most other texts of that day, tables of statistics from across the world and ages, rows of integral signs and equations, intricate charts and graphs. Pareto was born of an exiled noble Genoese family in 1848 in Paris and his father, Raffaele Pareto, was an Italian civil engineer and Ligurian marquis who had left Italy much like Giuseppe Mazzini and other Italian nationalists. His mother, Marie Metenier, was a French woman, enthusiastic about the 1848 German revolution, his parents named him Fritz Wilfried, which became Vilfredo Federico upon his familys move back to Italy in 1858. In 1869, he earned a degree in engineering from what is now the Polytechnic University of Turin. His dissertation was entitled The Fundamental Principles of Equilibrium in Solid Bodies and his later interest in equilibrium analysis in economics and sociology can be traced back to this paper. For some years after graduation, he worked as a engineer, first for the state-owned Italian Railway Company. He was manager of the Iron Works of San Giovanni Valdarno and he did not begin serious work in economics until his mid-forties. He started his career a fiery liberal, besting the most ardent British liberals with his attacks on any form of government intervention in the free market, in 1886 he became a lecturer on economics and management at the University of Florence. His stay in Florence was marked by activity, much of it fueled by his own frustrations with government regulators. In 1889, after the death of his parents, Pareto changed his lifestyle, quitting his job and marrying a Russian and she left him in 1902 for a young servant. In 1893, he succeeded Léon Walras to the chair of Political Economy at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland where he remained for the rest of his life. In 1906, he made the observation that twenty percent of the population owned eighty percent of the property in Italy
16.
Lionel Robbins
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Lionel Charles Robbins, Baron Robbins, CH, CB, FBA was a British economist and body of the economics department at the London School of Economics. He is known for his leadership at LSE, his definition of economics. Robbins was born in Sipson, west of London, the son of Rowland Richard and his father was a farmer and was also a member of Middlesex county council. Robbins sister Caroline was a noted Professor of History, Robbins was educated at the local grammar school, Southall county school. His university education began at University College London, but was interrupted by the First World War and he served in the Royal Field Artillery as an officer between 1916 and 1918, when he was wounded and returned home. He became interested in socialism and resumed his studies at the London School of Economics. Robbins is famous for his definition of economics, Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship ends and scarce means which have alternative uses. Robbins succeeded Allyn Young in the chair of the London School of Economics in 1929, among his first appointments was Friedrich A. Hayek, who bred a new generation of English-speaking continentals such as John Hicks, Nicholas Kaldor, Abba Lerner and Tibor Scitovsky. Frank Knight was an American influence on Robbins, Robbins was very familiar with the work of economists in Continental Europe. Robbins became involved in the socialist calculation debate on the side of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, and against Abba Lerner, Fred Taylor, Robbins was initially opposed to Keyness General Theory, and the evolution of his explanation of economic development has been criticised several times. His 1934 treatise on the Great Depression is an analysis of that period, Robbins saw his London School of Economics as a bulwark against Cambridge, whether it was populated by Marshallians or Keynesians. He became the first Chancellor of the new University of Stirling in 1968 and he also advocated massive government support for the arts, in addition to universities. In the latter part of his life, Robbins turned to the history of economic thought, Lectures, as he gave them in 1980, have been published posthumously. Robbins was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath in the 1944 Birthday Honours, on 16 June 1959 he was created a life peer as Baron Robbins, of Clare Market in the City of Westminster. Robbins received an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 1967, in the 1968 New Year Honours Lord Robbins was appointed a Companion of Honour. The Lionel Robbins Building at the London School of Economics is named after him, Robbins early essays were combative in spirit, stressing the subjectivist theory of value beyond what Anglo-Saxon economics had been used to. He wrote a famous 1932 essay on economic methodology and his work on costs brought Wiesers alternative cost theorem of supply to England. His critique of the Marshallian theory of the firm, and his critique of the Pigovian Welfare Economics
17.
Rational choice theory
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Rational choice theory, also known as choice theory or rational action theory, is a framework for understanding and often formally modeling social and economic behavior. The basic premise of rational choice theory is that social behavior results from the behavior of individual actors. The theory also focuses on the determinants of the individual choices, Rational choice theory then assumes that an individual has preferences among the available choice alternatives that allow them to state which option they prefer. These preferences are assumed to be complete and transitive, Rationality is widely used as an assumption of the behavior of individuals in microeconomic models and analyses and appears in almost all economics textbook treatments of human decision-making. It is also used in science, sociology, and philosophy. A particular version of rationality is instrumental rationality, which involves seeking the most cost-effective means to achieve a goal without reflecting on the worthiness of that goal. Gary Becker was a proponent of applying rational actor models more widely. Becker won the 1992 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his studies of discrimination, crime, the concept of rationality used in rational choice theory is different from the colloquial and most philosophical use of the word. Colloquially, rational behaviour typically means sensible, predictable, or in a thoughtful, Rational choice theory uses a narrower definition of rationality. At its most basic level, behavior is if it is goal-oriented, reflective. This contrasts with behavior that is random, impulsive, conditioned, early neoclassical economists writing about rational choice, including William Stanley Jevons, assumed that agents make consumption choices so as to maximize their happiness, or utility. Contemporary theory bases rational choice on a set of axioms that need to be satisfied. It mandates just a consistent ranking of the alternatives, individuals choose the best action according to their personal preferences and the constraints facing them. Rational choice theorists do not claim that the theory describes the choice process, an assumption often added to the rational choice paradigm is that individual preferences are self-interested, in which case the individual can be referred to as a homo economicus. Such an individual acts as if balancing costs against benefits to arrive at action that maximizes personal advantage, in this view, the only way to judge the success of a hypothesis is empirical tests. To use an example from Milton Friedman, if a theory says that the behavior of the leaves of a tree is explained by their rationality passes the empirical test. Without specifying the individuals goal or preferences it may not be possible to empirically test, or falsify, however, the predictions made by a specific version of the theory are testable. In recent years, the most prevalent version of rational choice theory, economists are learning from other fields, such as psychology, and are enriching their theories of choice in order to get a more accurate view of human decision-making
18.
Economic model
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In economics, a model is a theoretical construct representing economic processes by a set of variables and a set of logical and/or quantitative relationships between them. The economic model is a framework designed to illustrate complex processes, often. Frequently, economic models posit structural parameters, structural parameters are underlying parameters in a model or class of models. A model may have various exogenous variables, and those variables may change to various responses by economic variables. Methodological uses of models include investigation, theorizing, and fitting theories to the world, simplification is particularly important for economics given the enormous complexity of economic processes. Selection is important because the nature of a model will often determine what facts will be looked at. Planning and allocation, in the case of centrally planned economies, since the 1990s many long-term risk management models have incorporated economic relationships between simulated variables in an attempt to detect high-exposure future scenarios. A model establishes a framework for applying logic and mathematics that can be independently discussed and tested. Policies and arguments that rely on economic models have a basis for soundness. Therefore, conclusions drawn from models will be representations of economic facts. However, properly constructed models can remove extraneous information and isolate useful approximations of key relationships, in this way more can be understood about the relationships in question than by trying to understand the entire economic process. The details of construction vary with type of model and its application. Generally any modelling process has two steps, generating a model, then checking the model for accuracy, the diagnostic step is important because a model is only useful to the extent that it accurately mirrors the relationships that it purports to describe. Creating and diagnosing a model is frequently an iterative process in which the model is modified with each iteration of diagnosis, once a satisfactory model is found, it should be double checked by applying it to a different data set. Stochastic models are formulated using stochastic processes and they model economically observable values over time. Most of econometrics is based on statistics to formulate and test hypotheses about these processes or estimate parameters for them, examples of these are autoregressive moving average models and related ones such as autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity and GARCH models for the modelling of heteroskedasticity. Non-stochastic models may be qualitative or quantitative. For such models, economists often use two-dimensional graphs instead of functions, qualitative models – although almost all economic models involve some form of mathematical or quantitative analysis, qualitative models are occasionally used
19.
Homo sapiens
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Homo sapiens is the binomial nomenclature for the only extant human species. Homo is the genus, which also includes Neanderthals and many other extinct species of hominid. Modern humans are the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens, which differentiates them from what has been argued to be their direct ancestor, the binomial name Homo sapiens was coined by Carl Linnaeus. The Latin noun homō means man, human being, subspecies of H. sapiens include Homo sapiens idaltu and the only extant subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens. Some sources show Neanderthals as a subspecies, similarly, the discovered specimens of the Homo rhodesiensis species have been classified by some as a subspecies, but these last two subspecies classifications are not widely accepted by scientists. Traditionally, there are two competing views in paleoanthropology about the origin of H. sapiens, the recent African origin, since 2010, genetic research has led to the emergence of an intermediate position, characterised by mostly recent African origin plus limited admixture with archaic humans. The recent African origin of humans is the mainstream model that describes the origin. The theory is called the Out-of-Africa model in the press, and academically the recent single-origin hypothesis, Replacement Hypothesis. The hypothesis that humans have a single origin was published in Charles Darwins Descent of Man, the concept was speculative until the 1980s, when it was corroborated by a study of present-day mitochondrial DNA, combined with evidence based on physical anthropology of archaic specimens. The recent single origin of humans in East Africa is the near-consensus position held within the scientific community. However, recent sequencing of the full Neanderthal genome suggests Neanderthals, the authors of the study suggest that their findings are consistent with Neanderthal admixture of up to 4% in some populations. But the study suggests that there may be other reasons why humans. That study however does not explain why only a fraction of humans have Neanderthal DNA. The multiregional origin model provides an explanation for the pattern of evolution proposed by Milford H. Wolpoff in 1988. Scientific study of evolution is concerned, primarily, with the development of the genus Homo. Modern humans are defined as the Homo sapiens species, of which the extant subspecies is known as Homo sapiens sapiens. Homo sapiens idaltu, the known subspecies, is now extinct. Similarly, the specimens of the Homo rhodesiensis species have been classified by some as a subspecies
20.
Institution
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Institutions are stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior. As structures or mechanisms of social order, they govern the behaviour of a set of individuals within a given community, Institutions are identified with a social purpose, transcending individuals and intentions by mediating the rules that govern living behavior. Primary or meta-institutions are institutions such as the family that are enough to encompass other institutions. As structures and mechanisms of social order, institutions are an object of study in social sciences such as political science, anthropology, economics. Institutions are also a concern for law, the formal mechanism for political rule-making. That is, institutions arise, develop and function in a pattern of social self-organization beyond conscious intentions of the individuals involved, as mechanisms of social interaction, institutions manifest in both formal organizations, such as the U. S. Formal institutions are set forth by a relevant authority and informal institutions are generally unwritten societal rules, norms. Primary or meta-institutions are institutions that encompass many other institutions, both formal and informal (e. g. the family, government, the economy, education, most important institutions, considered abstractly, have both objective and subjective aspects, examples include money and marriage. The subjective experience of money is so pervasive and persuasive that economists talk of the illusion and try to disabuse their students of it. Examples of institutions include, Family, The family is the center of the childs life, the family teaches children cultural values and attitudes about themselves and others - see sociology of the family. Children learn continuously from the environment that adults create, Children also become aware of class at a very early age and assign different values to each class accordingly. Religion, Some believe religion is like an ethnic or cultural category, making it likely for the individuals to break from religious affiliations. Parental religious participation is the most influential part of religious socialization—more so than religious peers or religious beliefs, see sociology of religion and civil religion. Peer groups, A peer group is a group whose members have interests, social positions. This is where children can escape supervision and learn to form relationships on their own, the influence of the peer group typically peaks during adolescence however peer groups generally only affect short term interests unlike the family which has long term influence. Capitalist society may encourage the growth of centralization and interdependence under the control of an elite, socialism encourages democratic, bottom-up control by the people and their communities. Legal systems, Children are pressured from both parents and peers to conform and obey certain laws or norms of the group/community, parents’ attitudes toward legal systems influence children’s views as to what is legally acceptable. For example, children whose parents are continually in jail are more accepting of incarceration, see jurisprudence, philosophy of law, sociology of law
21.
Social science
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Social science is a major category of academic disciplines, concerned with society and the relationships among individuals within a society. It in turn has many branches, each of which is considered a social science, the social sciences include economics, political science, human geography, demography, psychology, sociology, anthropology, archaeology, jurisprudence, history, and linguistics. The term is sometimes used to refer specifically to the field of sociology. A more detailed list of sub-disciplines within the sciences can be found at Outline of social science. Positivist social scientists use methods resembling those of the sciences as tools for understanding society. In modern academic practice, researchers are often eclectic, using multiple methodologies, the term social research has also acquired a degree of autonomy as practitioners from various disciplines share in its aims and methods. Social sciences came forth from the philosophy of the time and were influenced by the Age of Revolutions, such as the Industrial Revolution. The social sciences developed from the sciences, or the systematic knowledge-bases or prescriptive practices, the beginnings of the social sciences in the 18th century are reflected in the grand encyclopedia of Diderot, with articles from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other pioneers. The growth of the sciences is also reflected in other specialized encyclopedias. The modern period saw social science first used as a distinct conceptual field, Social science was influenced by positivism, focusing on knowledge based on actual positive sense experience and avoiding the negative, metaphysical speculation was avoided. Auguste Comte used the term science sociale to describe the field, taken from the ideas of Charles Fourier, following this period, there were five paths of development that sprang forth in the social sciences, influenced by Comte on other fields. One route that was taken was the rise of social research, large statistical surveys were undertaken in various parts of the United States and Europe. Another route undertaken was initiated by Émile Durkheim, studying social facts, a third means developed, arising from the methodological dichotomy present, in which social phenomena were identified with and understood, this was championed by figures such as Max Weber. The fourth route taken, based in economics, was developed and furthered economic knowledge as a hard science, the last path was the correlation of knowledge and social values, the antipositivism and verstehen sociology of Max Weber firmly demanded this distinction. In this route, theory and prescription were non-overlapping formal discussions of a subject, around the start of the 20th century, Enlightenment philosophy was challenged in various quarters. The development of social science subfields became very quantitative in methodology, examples of boundary blurring include emerging disciplines like social research of medicine, sociobiology, neuropsychology, bioeconomics and the history and sociology of science. Increasingly, quantitative research and qualitative methods are being integrated in the study of action and its implications. In the first half of the 20th century, statistics became a discipline of applied mathematics
22.
Rational expectations
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In economics, rational expectations are model-consistent expectations, in that agents inside the model on average assume the models predictions are valid. Rational expectations ensure internal consistency in aggregate stochastic models, to obtain consistency within a model, the predictions of the future value of economically relevant variables are optimal given the decision-makers information set and model structure. The rational expectations assumption is used especially in many contemporary macroeconomic models, Rational expectations does not imply individual rationality and should not be confused with rational choice theory, which is used extensively in, among others, game theory. Since most macroeconomic models today study decisions over many periods, the expectations of workers, consumers, how to model these expectations has long been controversial, and it is well known that the macroeconomic predictions of the model may differ depending on the assumptions made about expectations. To assume rational expectations is to assume that agents expectations may be wrong and this way of modeling expectations was originally proposed by John F. Muth and later became influential when it was used by Robert Lucas, Jr. and others. Modeling expectations is crucial in all models which study how a number of individuals, firms. The notion is one of intellectual modesty, the common sense is rationality, therefore Muth called the argument rational expectations. Rational expectations theory defines this kind of expectations as being the best guess of the future that all available information. Thus, it is assumed that outcomes that are being forecast do not differ systematically from the equilibrium results. As a result, rational expectations do not differ systematically or predictably from equilibrium results and that is, it assumes that people do not make systematic errors when predicting the future, and deviations from perfect foresight are only random. In an economic model, this is typically modelled by assuming that the value of a variable is equal to the expected value predicted by the model. For example, suppose that P is the price in a simple market, determined by supply. Rational expectations theories were developed in response to perceived flaws in theories based on adaptive expectations, under adaptive expectations, expectations of the future value of an economic variable are based on past values. For example, people would be assumed to predict inflation by looking at inflation last year, under adaptive expectations, if the economy suffers from constantly rising inflation rates, people would be assumed to always underestimate inflation. Many economists have regarded this as unrealistic, believing that individuals would sooner or later realize the trend. The rational expectations hypothesis has been used to some strong conclusions about economic policymaking. An example is the policy ineffectiveness proposition developed by Thomas Sargent and this in turn will counteract the expansionary effect of the increased money supply. All that the government can do is raise the inflation rate and this is a distinctly New Classical outcome
23.
Sociology
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Sociology is the study of social behaviour or society, including its origins, development, organisation, networks, and institutions. It is a science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about social order, disorder. Many sociologists aim to research that may be applied directly to social policy and welfare. Subject matter ranges from the level of individual agency and interaction to the macro level of systems. The traditional focuses of sociology include social stratification, social class, social mobility, religion, secularization, law, sexuality, the range of social scientific methods has also expanded. Social researchers draw upon a variety of qualitative and quantitative techniques, the linguistic and cultural turns of the mid-twentieth century led to increasingly interpretative, hermeneutic, and philosophic approaches towards the analysis of society. There is often a great deal of crossover between social research, market research, and other statistical fields, Sociology is distinguished from various general social studies courses, which bear little relation to sociological theory or to social-science research-methodology. The US National Science Foundation classifies sociology as a STEM field, Sociological reasoning pre-dates the foundation of the discipline. Social analysis has origins in the stock of Western knowledge and philosophy. The origin of the survey, i. e, there is evidence of early sociology in medieval Arab writings. The word sociology is derived from both Latin and Greek origins, the Latin word, socius, companion, the suffix -logy, the study of from Greek -λογία from λόγος, lógos, word, knowledge. It was first coined in 1780 by the French essayist Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès in an unpublished manuscript, Sociology was later defined independently by the French philosopher of science, Auguste Comte, in 1838. Comte used this term to describe a new way of looking at society, Comte had earlier used the term social physics, but that had subsequently been appropriated by others, most notably the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet. Comte endeavoured to unify history, psychology and economics through the understanding of the social realm. Comte believed a positivist stage would mark the final era, after conjectural theological and metaphysical phases, Comte gave a powerful impetus to the development of sociology, an impetus which bore fruit in the later decades of the nineteenth century. To say this is not to claim that French sociologists such as Durkheim were devoted disciples of the high priest of positivism. To be sure, beginnings can be traced back well beyond Montesquieu, for example, Marx rejected Comtean positivism but in attempting to develop a science of society nevertheless came to be recognized as a founder of sociology as the word gained wider meaning. For Isaiah Berlin, Marx may be regarded as the father of modern sociology
24.
Oxford English Dictionary
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The Oxford English Dictionary is a descriptive dictionary of the English language, published by the Oxford University Press. The second edition came to 21,728 pages in 20 volumes, in 1895, the title The Oxford English Dictionary was first used unofficially on the covers of the series, and in 1928 the full dictionary was republished in ten bound volumes. In 1933, the title The Oxford English Dictionary fully replaced the name in all occurrences in its reprinting as twelve volumes with a one-volume supplement. More supplements came over the years until 1989, when the edition was published. Since 2000, an edition of the dictionary has been underway. The first electronic version of the dictionary was available in 1988. The online version has been available since 2000, and as of April 2014 was receiving two million hits per month. The third edition of the dictionary will probably appear in electronic form, Nigel Portwood, chief executive of Oxford University Press. As a historical dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary explains words by showing their development rather than merely their present-day usages, therefore, it shows definitions in the order that the sense of the word began being used, including word meanings which are no longer used. The format of the OEDs entries has influenced numerous other historical lexicography projects and this influenced later volumes of this and other lexicographical works. As of 30 November 2005, the Oxford English Dictionary contained approximately 301,100 main entries, the dictionarys latest, complete print edition was printed in 20 volumes, comprising 291,500 entries in 21,730 pages. The longest entry in the OED2 was for the verb set, as entries began to be revised for the OED3 in sequence starting from M, the longest entry became make in 2000, then put in 2007, then run in 2011. Despite its impressive size, the OED is neither the worlds largest nor the earliest exhaustive dictionary of a language, the Dutch dictionary Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal is the worlds largest dictionary, has similar aims to the OED and took twice as long to complete. Another earlier large dictionary is the Grimm brothers dictionary of the German language, begun in 1838, the official dictionary of Spanish is the Diccionario de la lengua española, and its first edition was published in 1780. The Kangxi dictionary of Chinese was published in 1716, trench suggested that a new, truly comprehensive dictionary was needed. On 7 January 1858, the Society formally adopted the idea of a new dictionary. Volunteer readers would be assigned particular books, copying passages illustrating word usage onto quotation slips, later the same year, the Society agreed to the project in principle, with the title A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles. He withdrew and Herbert Coleridge became the first editor, on 12 May 1860, Coleridges dictionary plan was published and research was started
25.
Latin
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Latin is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. The Latin alphabet is derived from the Etruscan and Greek alphabets, Latin was originally spoken in Latium, in the Italian Peninsula. Through the power of the Roman Republic, it became the dominant language, Vulgar Latin developed into the Romance languages, such as Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Romanian. Latin, Italian and French have contributed many words to the English language, Latin and Ancient Greek roots are used in theology, biology, and medicine. By the late Roman Republic, Old Latin had been standardised into Classical Latin, Vulgar Latin was the colloquial form spoken during the same time and attested in inscriptions and the works of comic playwrights like Plautus and Terence. Late Latin is the language from the 3rd century. Later, Early Modern Latin and Modern Latin evolved, Latin was used as the language of international communication, scholarship, and science until well into the 18th century, when it began to be supplanted by vernaculars. Ecclesiastical Latin remains the language of the Holy See and the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church. Today, many students, scholars and members of the Catholic clergy speak Latin fluently and it is taught in primary, secondary and postsecondary educational institutions around the world. The language has been passed down through various forms, some inscriptions have been published in an internationally agreed, monumental, multivolume series, the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. Authors and publishers vary, but the format is about the same, volumes detailing inscriptions with a critical apparatus stating the provenance, the reading and interpretation of these inscriptions is the subject matter of the field of epigraphy. The works of several hundred ancient authors who wrote in Latin have survived in whole or in part and they are in part the subject matter of the field of classics. The Cat in the Hat, and a book of fairy tales, additional resources include phrasebooks and resources for rendering everyday phrases and concepts into Latin, such as Meissners Latin Phrasebook. The Latin influence in English has been significant at all stages of its insular development. From the 16th to the 18th centuries, English writers cobbled together huge numbers of new words from Latin and Greek words, dubbed inkhorn terms, as if they had spilled from a pot of ink. Many of these words were used once by the author and then forgotten, many of the most common polysyllabic English words are of Latin origin through the medium of Old French. Romance words make respectively 59%, 20% and 14% of English, German and those figures can rise dramatically when only non-compound and non-derived words are included. Accordingly, Romance words make roughly 35% of the vocabulary of Dutch, Roman engineering had the same effect on scientific terminology as a whole
26.
Amartya Sen
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Amartya Kumar Sen is an Indian economist and philosopher, who since 1972 has taught and worked in the United Kingdom and the United States. He is currently the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor at Harvard University and he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 and Indias Bharat Ratna in 1999 for his work in welfare economics. Sen was born in a Bengali Baidya family in Manikganj, to Ashutosh Sen, Sens family was from Wari and Manikganj, Dhaka, both in present-day Bangladesh. Sens mother Amita Sen was the daughter of Kshiti Mohan Sen and he served as the Vice Chancellor of Visva-Bharati University for some years. Sen began his education at St Gregorys School in Dhaka in 1940. From fall 1941, Sen studied at Patha Bhavana, Santiniketan, the school had many progressive features, at the school, any focus on examinations or competitive testing was deeply frowned upon. In addition, the school stressed cultural diversity, and embraced influences from the rest of the world. In 1951, he went to Presidency College, Kolkata, where he earned a B. A. in Economics with First Class, with a minor in Mathematics, while at Presidency, Sen was diagnosed with oral cancer, and given a 15% chance of living five years. With radiation treatment, he survived, and in 1953 he moved to Trinity College, Cambridge and he was elected President of the Cambridge Majlis. While Sen was officially a Ph and he served in that position, starting the new Economics Department, during 1956 to 1958. Meanwhile, Sen was elected to a Prize Fellowship at Trinity College and his interest in philosophy, however, dates back to his college days at Presidency, where he read books on philosophy and debated philosophical themes. In Cambridge, there were major debates between supporters of Keynesian economics on the one hand, and the neo-classical economists skeptical of Keynes, quentin Skinner notes that Sen was a member of the secret society Cambridge Apostles during his time at Cambridge. Sens work on Choice of Technique complemented that of Maurice Dobb, in other words, workers were expected to demand no improvement in their standard of living despite having become more productive. Sens papers in the late 1960s and early 1970s helped develop the theory of social choice, which first came to prominence in the work by the American economist Kenneth Arrow. Sen also argued that the Bengal famine was caused by an economic boom that raised food prices. Sens interest in famine stemmed from personal experience, as a nine-year-old boy, he witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943, in which three million people perished. This staggering loss of life was unnecessary, Sen later concluded, in Poverty and Famines, Sen revealed that in many cases of famine, food supplies were not significantly reduced. In Bengal, for example, food production, while down on the year, was higher than in previous non-famine years
27.
Marshall Sahlins
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Marshall David Sahlins is an American anthropologist best known for his ethnographic work in the Pacific and for his contributions to anthropological theory. He is currently Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, Sahlins received his bachelor of arts and master of arts degrees at the University of Michigan where he studied with evolutionary anthropologist Leslie White. He earned his PhD at Columbia University in 1954, there his intellectual influences included Eric Wolf, Morton Fried, Sidney Mintz, and the economic historian Karl Polanyi. After receiving his PhD, he returned to teach at the University of Michigan, in 1968, Sahlins signed the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. In the late 1960s, he spent two years in Paris, where he was exposed to French intellectual life and the student protests of May 1968. In 1973, he took a position in the department at the University of Chicago. His commitment to activism has continued throughout his time at Chicago, the resignation followed the publication in that month of Chagnons memoir and widespread coverage of the memoir, including a profile of Chagnon in the New York Times magazine. Alongside his research and activism, Sahlins trained a host of students who went on to become prominent in the field, one such student, Gayle Rubin, said, Sahlins is a mesmerizing speaker and a brilliant thinker. By the time he finished the first lecture, I was hooked, in 2001, Sahlins became publisher of Prickly Pear Pamphlets, which was started in 1993 by anthropologists Keith Hart and Anna Grimshaw, and was renamed Prickly Paradigm Press. The imprint specializes in small pamphlets on unconventional subjects in anthropology, critical theory, philosophy and his brother was the writer and comedian Bernard Sahlins. Although his focus has been the entire Pacific, Sahlins has done most of his research in Fiji, Sahlinss training under Leslie White, a proponent of materialist and evolutionary anthropology at the University of Michigan, is reflected in his early work. In his Evolution and Culture, he touched on the areas of cultural evolution and he divided the evolution of societies into general and specific. General evolution is the tendency of cultural and social systems to increase in complexity, organization, however, as the various cultures are not isolated, there is interaction and a diffusion of their qualities. This leads cultures to develop in different ways, as elements are introduced to them in different combinations. Moala, Sahlinss first major monograph, exemplifies this approach, stone Age Economics collects some of Sahlinss key essays in substantivist economic anthropology. Perhaps Sahlinss most famous essay from the collection, The Original Affluent Society, stone Age Economics inaugurated Sahlinss persistent critique of the discipline of economics, particularly in its Neoclassical form. After the publication of Culture and Practical Reason in 1976, his focus shifted to the relation between history and anthropology, and the way different cultures understand and make history. Of central concern in this work is the problem of historical transformation, earlier evolutionary models, by contrast, claimed that culture arose as an adaptation to the natural environment
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Marcel Mauss
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Marcel Mauss was a French sociologist. The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss academic work traversed the boundaries between sociology and anthropology, Mauss had a significant influence upon Claude Lévi-Strauss, the founder of structural anthropology. His most famous book is The Gift, Mauss was born in Épinal, Vosges, to a Jewish family, and studied philosophy at Bordeaux, where his maternal uncle Émile Durkheim was teaching at the time. He passed the agrégation in 1893 and he was also first cousin of the much younger Claudette Bloch, a marine biologist and mother of Maurice Bloch, who has become a noted anthropologist. Instead of taking the route of teaching at a lycée following college, Mauss moved to Paris and took up the study of comparative religion. His first publication in 1896 marked the beginning of a career that would produce several landmarks in the sociological literature. Like many members of Année Sociologique, Mauss was attracted to socialism and he was particularly active in the events of the Dreyfus affair. Towards the end of the century, he helped edit such left-wing papers as Le Populaire, LHumanité and Le Mouvement socialiste, the last in collaboration with Georges Sorel. In 1901 Mauss took up a chair in the history of religion and uncivilized peoples at the École pratique des hautes études and it was at this time that he began drawing more on ethnography, and his work began to develop characteristics now associated with formal anthropology. The years of World War I were absolutely devastating for Mauss, many of his friends and colleagues died in the war, and his uncle Durkheim died shortly before its end. Politically, the years were also difficult for Mauss. Durkheim had made changes to school curricula across France, and after his death a backlash against his students began, like many other followers of Durkheim, Mauss took refuge in administration. He secured Durkheims legacy by founding institutions to carry out directions of research, such as lInstitut Français de Sociologie, among students he influenced was George Devereux, later an influential anthropologist who combined ethnology with psychoanalysis. In 1931 Mauss took up the chair of Sociology at the Collège de France and he actively fought against anti-semitism and racial politics both before and after World War II. In his classic work The Gift, Mauss argued that gifts are never truly free, rather, human history is full of examples of gifts bringing about reciprocal exchange. The famous question that drove his inquiry into the anthropology of the gift was, the answer is simple, the gift is a total prestation, imbued with spiritual mechanisms, engaging the honour of both giver and receiver. Such transactions transcend the divisions between the spiritual and the material in a way that, according to Mauss, is almost magical. The giver does not merely give an object but also part of himself, for the object is tied to the giver
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Maurice Godelier
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Maurice Godelier is a French anthropologist who works as the Director of Studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. He is one of the most influential French anthropologists and is best known as one of the earliest advocates of Marxisms incorporation into anthropology and he is also known for his field work among the Baruya in Papua New Guinea from the 1960s to the 1980s. Godelier was born to a family in provincial France in the commune Cambrai. In 1955, Godelier received a degree in philosophy, a degree in psychology. During his early education, he was interested in the works of Husserl. He attended the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud from 1955 to 1959, Godelier developed a specific interest in Marxist theory and politics, influenced by Claude Lévi-Strauss, he chose to pursue the field of anthropology. In 1981, he received a degree from the Université catholique de Louvain. In 1963, Godelier initiated the first program on economic anthropology in France at College de France, in this program he focused on refining the Marxist ideas of base and superstructure and modes of production. From 1966 to 1969, Godelier conducted his first major anthropological field study on the Baruya in Papua New Guinea and his research provided significant contributions to the limited understanding of New Guinea cultures. In 1982, he used his research to write an ethnography on the Baruya, the book, entitled The Making of Great Men, discusses sex- and gender-based inequality and provided insight into the systems of power in Melanesia. His analysis of the systems of power was developed in Big Men and Great Men, published in 1991. In the late 1990s, Godelier addressed the future of peripheral societies under the effects of world capitalism, in 1995, he founded the Center for Research and Documentation on Oceania, which he directed until 1999. From 2000 to 2003, Godelier served on various organizations related to research in social sciences in Europe and he is currently president of the Société des océanistes. Karl Wittfogel Rationalité et Irrationalité en Economie –1969 La production des Grands Hommes, pouvoir et domination masculine chez les Baruya de Nouvelle Guinée, Ed. Meurtre du Père, Sacrifice de la Sexualité,1996 La Production du corps, approches anthropologiques et historiques and Le Corps humain, supplicié, possédé, cannibalisé. Texts collected and edited by Maurice Godelier and Michel Panoff, interview with Godelier Generation Onlines presentation of Godelier Jack Goodys book review of Godeliers Métamorphoses de la parenté
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Gift economy
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A gift economy, gift culture, or gift exchange is a mode of exchange where valuables are not traded or sold, but rather given without an explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards. This contrasts with an economy or a market economy, where goods. Social norms and custom govern gift exchange, Gifts are not given in an explicit exchange of goods or services for money or some other commodity. The nature of gift economies forms the subject of a debate in anthropology. Anthropological research into gift economies began with Bronisław Malinowskis description of the Kula ring in the Trobriand Islands during World War I. The Kula trade appeared to be gift-like since Trobrianders would travel great distances over dangerous seas to give what were considered valuable objects without any guarantee of a return. According to anthropologists Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry, it is the relationship between market and non-market exchange that attracts the most attention. Gift economies are said, by some, to communities. Gift ideology in highly commercialized societies differs from the typical of non-market societies. Gift economies must also be differentiated from several closely related phenomena, such as common property regimes, however, he claims that anthropologists, through analysis of a variety of cultural and historical forms of exchange, have established that no universal practice exists. Gift exchange is frequently embedded in political, kin, or religious institutions, gift-giving is a form of transfer of property rights over particular objects. The nature of property rights varies from society to society, from culture to culture. The nature of gift-giving is thus altered by the type of property regime in place, property is not a thing, but a relationship amongst people about things. According to Chris Hann, property is a relationship that governs the conduct of people with respect to the use. Anthropologists analyze these relationships in terms of a variety of actors bundle of rights over objects, an example is the current debates around intellectual property rights. Hann and Strangelove both give the example of a book, over which the author retains a copyright. The gifts given in Kula exchange still remain, in some respects, in the example used above, copyright is one of those bundled rights that regulate the use and disposition of a book. Gift-giving in many societies is complicated because private property owned by an individual may be limited in scope
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Thorstein Veblen
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Thorstein Bunde Veblen was a Norwegian-American economist and sociologist. He was famous as a witty critic of capitalism, Veblen is famous for the idea of conspicuous consumption. Conspicuous consumption, along with conspicuous leisure, is performed to demonstrate wealth or mark social status, Veblen explains the concept in his best-known book, The Theory of the Leisure Class. Within the history of thought, Veblen is considered the leader of the institutional economics movement. Veblens distinction between institutions and technology is called the Veblenian dichotomy by contemporary economists. As a leading intellectual of the Progressive Era, Veblen attacked production for profit and his emphasis on conspicuous consumption greatly influenced the socialist thinkers who sought a non-Marxist critique of capitalism. Veblen was born on July 30,1857, in Cato, Wisconsin, to Norwegian American immigrant parents, Thomas Veblen and he was the fourth of twelve children in the Veblen family. His parents emigrated from Norway to Milwaukee, Wisconsin on September 16,1847, with little funds and this farmstead and other similar settlements were referred to as little Norways, oriented by the religious and cultural traditions of the old country. The farmstead was also where Veblen spent most of his childhood, Veblen began his schooling at the age of five. Since Norwegian was his first language, he learned English from neighbors and his parents also learned to speak English fluently, though they continued to read predominantly Norwegian literature with and around their family on the farmstead. The family farm eventually grew more prosperous, allowing Veblen’s parents to provide their children with their hope of formal education. Unlike most immigrant families of the time, Veblen and all of his siblings received training in lower schools, Veblen’s sister, Emily, was recognized as the first woman to graduate from a Minnesota college. Several critics have argued that Veblens Norwegian background and his isolation from American society are essential to the understanding of his writings. According to George M. Fredrickson the Norwegian society Veblen lived in was so isolated that when he left it he was, in a sense, at age 17, in 1874, Veblen was sent to attend nearby Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. Early in his schooling, he demonstrated both the bitterness and the sense of humor that would characterize his later works, Veblen studied economics and philosophy under the guidance of the young John Bates Clark, who went on to become a leader in the new field of neoclassical economics. Veblen later developed an interest in the sciences, taking courses within the fields of philosophy, natural history. Within the realm of philosophy, the works of Kant and Spencer were of greatest interest to him, in contrast, his studies in natural history and classical philology shaped his formal use of the disciplines of science and language respectively. After Veblen graduated from Carleton in 1880 he traveled east to study philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, while at Johns Hopkins he studied under Charles Sanders Peirce
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John Maynard Keynes
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John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes CB FBA, was a British economist whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. His ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics and he instead argued that aggregate demand determined the overall level of economic activity and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment. According to Keynesian economics, state intervention was necessary to moderate boom, Keynes advocated the use of fiscal and monetary policies to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions. He and other economists had disputed the ability of government to regulate the business cycle favorably with fiscal policy. When Time magazine included Keynes among its Most Important People of the Century in 1999, the Economist has described Keynes as Britains most famous 20th-century economist. In addition to being an economist, Keynes was also a servant, a director of the Bank of England. John Maynard Keynes was born in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England and his father, John Neville Keynes, was an economist and a lecturer in moral sciences at the University of Cambridge and his mother Florence Ada Keynes a local social reformer. Keynes was the first born, and was followed by two more children – Margaret Neville Keynes in 1885 and Geoffrey Keynes in 1887, Geoffrey became a surgeon and Margaret married the Nobel Prize-winning physiologist Archibald Hill. According to the economist and biographer Robert Skidelsky, Keyness parents were loving and they remained in the same house throughout their lives, where the children were always welcome to return. Keyness mother made her childrens interests her own, and according to Skidelsky, because she could grow up with her children, they never outgrew home. In January 1889, at the age of five and a half and he quickly showed a talent for arithmetic, but his health was poor leading to several long absences. He was tutored at home by a governess, Beatrice Mackintosh, in January 1892, at eight and a half, he started as a day pupil at St Faiths preparatory school. By 1894, Keynes was top of his class and excelling at mathematics, in 1896, St Faiths headmaster, Ralph Goodchild, wrote that Keynes was head and shoulders above all the other boys in the school and was confident that Keynes could get a scholarship to Eton. In 1897, Keynes won a scholarship to Eton College, where he displayed talent in a range of subjects, particularly mathematics, classics. At Eton, Keynes experienced the first love of his life in Dan Macmillan, despite his middle-class background, Keynes mixed easily with upper-class pupils. In 1902 Keynes left Eton for Kings College, Cambridge, after receiving a scholarship for this also to read mathematics, Alfred Marshall begged Keynes to become an economist, although Keyness own inclinations drew him towards philosophy – especially the ethical system of G. E. Moore. Keynes joined the Pitt Club and was an member of the semi-secretive Cambridge Apostles society. Like many members, Keynes retained a bond to the club after graduating, before leaving Cambridge, Keynes became the President of the Cambridge Union Society and Cambridge University Liberal Club
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Herbert A. Simon
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Simon received many top-level honors in life, including the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978 and the Turing Award in 1975. He also received degrees from various universities, such as from Harvard University. As of 2016, Simon was the most cited person in Artificial Intelligence, with almost a thousand highly cited publications, he was one of the most influential social scientists of the twentieth century. Herbert Alexander Simon was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on June 15,1916 and his father, Arthur Simon, was an electrical engineer who had come to the United States from Germany in 1903 after earning his engineering degree from the Technische Hochschule of Darmstadt. An inventor who was granted several patents, his father also was an independent patent attorney. His mother, Edna Marguerite Merkel, was an accomplished pianist whose ancestors had come from Prague and his European ancestors had been piano makers, goldsmiths, and vintners. Simons father was Jewish and his mother came from a family with Jewish, Lutheran, Simon was educated as a child in the public school system in Milwaukee where he developed an interest in science. He found schoolwork to be interesting and easy, through his uncle’s books on economics and psychology, Simon discovered the social sciences. Among his earliest influences, Simon has cited Richard Ely’s economics textbook, Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion, at that time, Simon argued from conviction, rather than cussedness in favor of Georges controversial single tax on land rents. In 1933, Simon entered the University of Chicago, and following those early influences, he studied the social sciences and he was interested in biology, but chose not to study it because of his color-blindness and awkwardness in the laboratory. He chose instead to focus on science and economics. His most important mentor at the University was Henry Schultz who was an econometrician, eventually his studies led him to the field of organizational decision-making, which would become the subject of his doctoral dissertation. After graduating with his degree, Simon obtained a research assistantship in municipal administration which turned into a directorship at the University of California. From 1942 to 1949, Simon was a professor of political science, there, he began participating in the seminars held by the staff of the Cowles Commission who at that time included Trygve Haavelmo, Jacob Marschak, and Tjalling Koopmans. He thus began a more in-depth study of economics in the area of institutionalism, Marschak brought Simon in to assist in the study he was currently undertaking with Sam Schurr of the “prospective economic effects of atomic energy”. From 1949 to 2001, Simon was a faculty at Carnegie Mellon, in 1949, Simon became a professor of administration and chairman of the Department of Industrial Management at Carnegie Tech. Simon later also taught psychology and computer science in the same university, Simon married Dorothea Pye in 1938. Their marriage lasted 63 years until his death from a cancerous tumor, in January 2001, Simon underwent surgery at UPMC Presbyterian to remove a cancerous tumor in his abdomen
