Talk:Economics/Draft

I have re-thought some of this article and tidied it up generally and I am now content to submit it for approval. - Nick Gardner 08:27, 5 February 2008 (CST)

On second thoughts there are a number of omissions that - though not of much interest to laymen - should be remedied for the sake of students of economics. Some of them can be dealt with at length in the proposed article on the philosophy of economics, but I think they should get brief references in this article so I plan to deal with them on the Tutorials subpage. I have started on economics as a science and I think there should also be something on normative and positive economics. - Nick Gardner 08:13, 7 February 2008 (CST)

rewriting the introductory material

I don't feel competent as a non-economist to do it myself, but I think that all of the introductory material could probably be rewritten (slightly) in order to put it all into a single paragraph -- or maybe two, I suppose. As it is, it looks to me to be a lot of single statements -- they *are* connected, however, so why shouldn't they be in a somewhat more literary-type organization? Hayford Peirce 17:35, 7 February 2008 (CST)

Yes, I was thinking along those lines. I suppose I should do it:-) Martin Baldwin-Edwards 20:40, 7 February 2008 (CST)

Thank you Hayford and Martin. Somehow the paragraph had "just growed" and your comment made me realise that it needed pruning. I hope it is OK now? - Nick Gardner 23:41, 7 February 2008 (CST)

Article format section

I think the article format section can be completely removed. The explanations of what the subpages contain are redundant - it's completely self-explanatory that the related articles subpage contains links to related articles and so on. It's also not something used anywhere else on the site. --Tom Morris 15:16, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

My principal reason for writing that section was to draw attention to the practice of confining the use of mathematics and graphs to a tutorials subpage - instead of the Wikipedia and previous CZ practice of including them in the main article. That was a controversial innovation when I introduced it but it was agreed with Martin Baldwin-Edwards when he was an economics editor. As far as I am aware, it is not general practice among other CZ workgroups. A second reason was to draw attention to the presence on the related articles subpage of an index of the topics dealt with in all of the economics articles - also a practice not found elsewhere.

However, I do not see how we can resolve our difference: I think the section is useful to the reader, and you do not - and neither of us has any evidence to support his case. If you feel so strongly as to delete the section, I should regret it but I should not attempt to put it back - I have (what I hope are) better things to do (!??). I leave it to you. Nick Gardner 08:23, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

Innovative Economic Policies for Climate Change Mitigation

Under this heading, a number of economic approaches to address environmental issues are being discussed here. I think these merit a closer look and incorporation into the system of economics articles, but I do not know what the best place for this may be. --Daniel Mietchen 22:46, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Daniel: I have great difficulty with the problem of balancing the uncertain costs of climate change against the estimated cost of measures to combat it, and I am profoundly sceptical of some of the subjective judgements that have been offered by environmentalists on the matter. I see this as a highly controversial issue on which Citizendium must take care not to present an unbalanced view - and I cannot, at present envisage an acceptable way of handling it. Consequently I do not feel able to take the initiative in the closer look that you propose, although I should be willing to try to evaluate contributions on the matter, acting in my role as an economics editor. Nick Gardner 06:51, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, Nick. We will take it from there. --Daniel Mietchen 08:03, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

Could use some clarification

I think this paragraph:

Economic theory has been developed by formulating hypothetical "models" of reality, and then by examining how far they reflect what happens in the real world. The objective of the process has not necessarily been to develop realistic assumptions about economic conduct, but rather to make better predictions of its outcomes. The use of empirically-based behavioural assumptions has not so far made a significant contribution to that objective.

especially the last sentence, is a bit confusing. Do you mean the traditional models that assume rational behavior, etc.? They don't contribute significantly to predictions of economic outcomes? I'm not challenging the proposition, if that is what is said, I'm merely bringing it the editors' attention that it is murky. Thanks. --Joseph Carpenter 01:21, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

When I wrote that, I was thinking about people who were drawing attention to the, admittedly important,, experimental psychology findings of Tversky and Kahneman that point to the unrealism of utility-maximising assumptions - without coming up with anything useful for working economists to use for forecasting and advice-giving. I was unaware of the work on the adaptive markets hypothesis being done by Andrew Lo and others at MIT. Now I realise that the last sentence may be untrue as well as unclear, and I have deleted it. Thank you for drawing it to my attention. If you have something in mind to contribute on the subject - either here or in the article on economic philosophy - please go ahead - or discuss it first if you prefer.Nick Gardner 07:25, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

PS the previous sentence referred to Milton Friedman's dictum to the effect that unrealistic assumptions are OK provided that they make possible the production of useful forecasts - which, I now realise, can be a very risky prescription.Nick Gardner 08:54, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

Several observations from a non-specialist

• Economy currently redirects here, but I assume it may eventually merit its own article, so I started a definition:
  • Economy [r]: (i) A complex interactive system that is engaged in the production and distribution of goods and services.; (ii) the careful use of money or other resources. ^[e]
• An illustration would be nice, e.g. something like Fig. S3 in here.
• I think the section "The economics articles" should be moved to a subpage (probably "Related Articles" or possibly "Addendum", or even something linked from "Catalogs") and replaced by a short notice (possibly on top of the article, similar to the one at Vietnam War).
• The introductory part could use some wikilinks.

--Daniel Mietchen 22:05, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

Daniel - Contributions concerning accessibility from non-specialists are always helpful, and yours has prompted me to carry out a long-overdue overhaul and update of this article. I should explain that when I did the first draft, I was not fully aware of the improvements to accessibility that can be achieved by the use of wikilinks and, like many economists, I was then more inclined to take mainstream theory as gospel than I am now, in view of the shortcomings revealed by the current crisis.

So - I have added wikilinks to the introductory statement and to all of the paragraphs and I have strengthened the references to behavioural economics (on which subject I plan to draft a new article). I have also adopted your suggestion concerning the "Economics artcles" section, and I have amended your definition of economy.

I have not fully mastered the technique of adding graphics to CZ articles, and I have been inclined to leave that task to others. I have considered "stealing" some diagrams from Wikipedia, but few of them seem to be helpful to the reader.

--Nick Gardner 11:28, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Nick, those changes have led to great improvements, as far as I can judge. The way this article is structured now could serve as a role model for other topics as well — there is no need for parent topic articles to be larger than subtopic articles, as long as the individual articles are properly interlinked and focused on what their title encompasses. I plan to redo brain morphometry and some related articles in a similar manner, but this works best if the subtopics already have sufficient material, which is not always the case yet.

You did not comment on whether economy should get its own article, nor on the suitability of this figure for illustration (be it here or in one of the sub-articles). As for the definition, I am not sure how frequent the use (ii) is — I have rarely seen it used in ways other than as a qualifier for something else (as in economy class). If disambiguation is necessary, though, then I think a disambiguation page pointing to two distinct articles would be better. In terms of use (i), I wonder how unpaid things like our editing here (which probably counts as a service) fit into the picture (I've seen them being treated as both within and outside of the economy, but I don't know what the textbooks say on this).

Finally, I see lots of parallels between economy and metabolism from a systems theory perspective, and there is also overlap to evolution. I don't have a good idea how to fit that into your current framework, particularly since you did not make reference to natural resources (except for mentioning land), nor to evolutionary economics. --Daniel Mietchen 22:26, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

I shall shortly be away from the computer for a while. I will come back to this when I return. Nick Gardner 07:20, 10 May 2010 (UTC)