Talk:Mercantilism/Archives/2021

Neomercantilism
Regarding the edit of April 21, 2021 by user 201.240.140.228, with the edit description being ''Can we not add terms that have no basis in economics? Or if we are going to at least put academic citations. Neomercantilism is not a thing as far as my academic economic career has seen during university. What you are describing here is protectionist policies. Mercantilism is based on accumulation of metals: Gold/Silver this standard has been dropped for a long while. "Innovation-Mercantilism" is a concept introduced by Samuelson (wrongly quoted here) and has no relation to "Mercantilism".'':

First of all, I don't think that the edit description is a very good place for having a discussion, so let's use this talk page instead.

Second, I am not an economist, academic or not, and I know essentially nothing about this. However, the edit caught my eye and got me curious, so I looked into it a very little bit. I noticed that there's a Wikipedia page for Neomercantilism. The page is over 16 years old at this point, and looks like it has had hundreds of edits in that time (I didn't count). It has reference citations too; I can't vouch for their integrity, of course, but they include citations that are at least supposedly to Oxford- and Cambridge-published books. Moreover, Wikipedia's standard Template:Economic systems sidebar has "Neomercantilist" as one of its listed "ideologies", and it seems to have been there for at least a decade or so (I haven't checked to figure out exactly where it came in, nor if it's been in consistently ever since then).

Outside of Wikipedia, Merriam-Webster's has an entry for "neo-mercantilism", as do various other online dictionaries, and Google has tens of thousands of hits. So it seems like it's a real thing. Again, I'm not an economist, and I've never even heard of it before, so for all I know it's a "real thing" in the sense that 9/11 Trutherism is a "real thing" (i.e. there are people who really do believe it's real, despite it being ridiculous). But even if so, widely-believed ridiculous things can be appropriate for Wikipedia articles, e.g. 9/11 truth movement.

So, I'm going to revert this recent change, as it seems to me like it boils down a deletion of a bunch of stuff because "I've never heard of it!", for a thing that apparently exists as a concept whether you (or I) have heard of it or not.

If anybody wants to change it back and get rid of it again, I'm not going to complain, but I ask that you please have the discussion here on the talk page rather than in the edit description, and also that you please consider whether it might be better to add things like "citation needed" templates or "clarify" templates or whatever to the appropriate spots rather than just deleting everything. Thanks. --Rwv37 (talk) 01:32, 22 April 2021 (UTC)