In this paper I reflect on Piero Sraffa’s concept of the ‘standpoint’ of the old classical economists from Adam Smith to Ricardo and compare it with the standpoint of the marginalist economists in the theory of value and distribution.
C. K. Ogden, the great semanticist and inventor of "Basic English", is reported to have commented on the saying: "words are convenient noises" by remarking that no more than one thousand of them have any precise meaning. This is particularly true of words relating to human affairs! The reason for this unsatisfactory state of affairs is not hard to find. Social relationships (political and…
GDP is the core measure of aggregate income used to measure total production from a country or region over a given period of time (usually a year, sometimes a quarter). You should have a quick catch up with what you have learned from EC2065 Macroeconomics about GDP and be able to distinguish between it and gross national product (GNP) . GDP per capita (divided by population) is, therefore,…
MOST of the chapters in this book are studies of economic develop- ment and policies in -various fields in the years 1945-50. The chapters which now constitute Part II were, however, designed as a background, describing the structure and principal characteris- tics of the British economy. There were obvious disadvantages in splitting up the …
We have designed this book to be a supplement to Robert J. Barro’s Macroeconomics, which is the textbook that is used in introductory macroeconomics courses at the University of Chicago. In teaching these courses, we have found that Barro’s treatment of the subject does not make use of the mathematical skills of our students. In particular, Barro relies almost exclusively on economic in…
This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of decomposition methods that have been developed since the seminal work of Oaxaca and Blinder in the early 1970s. These methods are used to decompose the difference in a distributional statistic between two groups, or its change over time, into various explanatory factors. While the original work of Oaxaca and Blinder considered the case of the me…
In this essay, we investigate the dominant position of economics within the network of the social sciences in the United States. We begin by documenting the relative insularity of economics, using bibliometric data. Next we analyze the tight management of the field from the top down, which gives economics its characteristic hierarchical structure. Economists also distinguish themselves from…
It is both a privilege and a pleasure to write a Foreword to Mark Hayes’s splendid monograph on the approach and method of The General Theory and, especially, on what they both owe to Keynes’s upbringing as a Marshallian