Talk:History of Economic Thought

I'm thinking hard about this.

First, it should differentiate micro- (transaction and contract and enterprise) economics from macro- (money supply) economics, as the field itself does.

Second, labor and work-time economics have been a parallel strain all through the development of the "English and American schools" of classical and neo-classical, they have been ignored for political reasons although there are no economists on this planet who claim that labor is "just another commodity input" - ok maybe some on another planet called the World Bank. ;-)

Third, leisure-time or free-time economics have been developing in informal ways for centuries, and Amartya Sen won the Swedish Bank Prize (often wrongly called the Nobel) for his 1999 book "Development As Freedom" on this topic... basically defining value as time free of obligation and worry about survival. This fits into the 'creativity economy' or 'intellectual capital' thinking... it's a product mostly of the last 10 years in its formal form and has a strong emphasis on ethics.

Fourth, commodity based money and ecology theory have unified a single view of "ecology as service" and rephrasing everything from "commodity and product" relationships which are static to "service, experience, transformation" relationships which are dynamic. Messy, but it makes far fewer assumptions about commodity contract enforcement, product labelling and standardization and safety, which can no longer be assumed to be provided by a single uniform state - in a world of transnational trading blocs. The people advocating this view (Costanza, Lovins, Lovins, Hawken) are critics of economics as a field for making unworkable assumptions, rather than being economists themselves. They are more talking about "the limits of economics".

Obviously, the anti-globalization_movement agrees to some degree, and so do land_reform economists like Joe Stiglitz, formerly Chief at the World Bank.

The movement to ban interest (usury) is extremely strong worldwide as well - there are economic regimes obscure in the western world that relied upon negative interest or micro-venture-capital (most notably in Islam which had strong provisions against interest until modern times) and community trusts.

Then there are the various "unity movements" that seek to see economics as a subset of physics (transaction clearing as something like the popping of quiffs in quantum mechanics), or ecology (that being the study of how nonhumans "make a living" - artificially separated from how humans do it), or ethics (Sen in particular). Some dismiss all three as right, green, and left ideologies being imposed on the empirical "science" of economics.

Yeah right. Personally, I think economics is a technology of governance, nothing more, and it's clear from history that it's been manipulated... how can one claim objectivity out of money supply mechanics? Alan Greenspan can't give a rational account of how he decides what he decides... and isn't clearly following any of the theories as above.

So, give me an idea of what's controversial here, and what is considered part of the "history_of_economics" and what should go into an entry on current issues, and I'll take a stab at incorporating some of this into something.