Talk:Economics/Archive 4
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Economics as a branch of mathematics
I'm a little concerned that Economics as a formal branch of mathematics is totally ignored here in favor of the social science, which came after the mathematical models. I'm also not sure it makes sense to call "scarcity" the fundamental concept underlying economics; I might have chosen rationality, comparability of values, or efficiency. No mention at all of important concepts like Pareto optimality, revealed preference, marginal utility? I'm just a dabbler, but surely there's someone here with a better background in mathematical economics that could do a reasonable job fixing this? --LDC
- Scarcity is in fact fundamental. If goods aren't scarce we can have all we want of them and so there is no need for economics. All the other terms-- like marginal utility, efficiency -- LDC mentions become important because we have scarcity.
- Further, mathematics is just a tool albeit a a very important one -- not an end in itself -- in economics. First and foremost, Economics is a social sciense. Historically, economics as a social science came first and the use of mathematics was introduced gradually.
Dated June 15, 2002 by User:Gretchen
Why insert the notion of scarcity?
Why not the allocation of resources, period? Whether they're 'scarce' or not isn't really relevant and too often a matter of opinion. There are plenty of doctors in the US, for example, but their distribution is hardly optimal. It's economic, however.
Dated July 29, 2003 by User:Socrates99
- Because the allocation of non-scarce resources is generally rather trival. If the resource is non-scarce give everyone who wants it as much as they want. In situations where it is interesting like patents and copyright, the time required to create them is scarce. As an amateur economist, I would define scarcity as something that has an opportunity cost so in that economic sense doctors are scarce since there is something else that would be useful for them to do (say like be a doctor in a different county). Jrincayc 03:49, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
First sentence
The first sentence has no verb: "Economics (formally known as political economy) the governance of the production, distribution and consumption of wealth and the various related problems of scarcity, finance, debt, taxation, labor, law, inequity, poverty, pollution, war, etc. " ...I am going to insert the word studies for now. Feel free to fix it differently. Kingturtle 04:54, 19 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Bad review of economics section
Someone wrote a bad review of economics section at kuro5hin:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2001/9/24/43858/2479/4#4
This comment could help the section to improve? joao
- Not if it's from September 2001, as it appears to be. The economics section here now bears simply no resemblance to what was here then. It's now really quite good, and contains a wide variety of topic coverage. The main page economics is not good enough, among other things it simply fails to explain scarcity well enough. Someone should dig around in the older versions to find a better explanation.
Dated September 12, 2003 by User:142.177.79.81