Reviewing the last chapter of Tim Harford’s The Logic of Life, Fabio Rojas writes,
the market system itself, as indicated by Tim’s concluding chapter, depends on population, innovation, and liberal economic institutions. These, in turn, depend on psychology, group culture, and networks, the domain of sociologists, psychologists, historians, and anthropologists.
Are we all sociologists now?
Mar 4 2008
Selwyn Duke says it short and sweet in "Why Most Voters Shouldn't Vote":Most of us agree that having an educated populace is a prerequisite for a sound democratic republic. We also know that not everyone is well-educated. Thus, it cannot be a good thing for everyone to vote. For those of you who had trouble followin...
Mar 4 2008
In a history of Swarthmore's economics department, Joshua Hausman wrote, Nearing is also the only Swarthmore professor to have taught eugenics in an economics class. He omits his past interest in eugenics from his 1972 autobiography... In a 1912 book, The Super Race: An American Problem, Nearing develops his ideas on...
Mar 4 2008
Reviewing the last chapter of Tim Harford's The Logic of Life, Fabio Rojas writes, the market system itself, as indicated by Tim’s concluding chapter, depends on population, innovation, and liberal economic institutions. These, in turn, depend on psychology, group culture, and networks, the domain of sociologists, p...
READER COMMENTS
Rimfax
Mar 4 2008 at 10:29am
Yes. That is the great transformation of modern popular economics. It is finally recognized that economic activity is inextricably linked to sociology in multiple ways. It is the only reason that economics is successfully being used at all to intervene in the ongoing political fetish for social engineering.
Jack
Mar 4 2008 at 11:08am
Increasingly, fields are defined by their methodology, not their “themes”. Economic imperialism (or for that matter, physical imperialism into biology, computer science, “econophysics”) is the outcome because right now, positivism and empirical (quant) studies are “in”, at least in the US. If instead the “in” method was postmodernism, we’d see literary imperialism or somesuch as was (briefly?) observed in France.
dearieme
Mar 4 2008 at 12:04pm
Once you all tire of writing footnotes to Smith and Ricardo, why not become sociologists? After all, the present incumbents have achieved nothing of note.
John
Mar 6 2008 at 2:53pm
This is where ‘Rational Man’ comes to the rescue. Dah da da dah!
Comments are closed.