ECONOMIC

Economic



Economic

Introduction

The word "economics" is derived from oikonomikos, which means skilled in household management. Although the word is very old, the discipline of economics as we understand it today is a relatively recent development. Modern economic thought emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries as the western world began its transformation from an agrarian to an industrial society. Progress in economic thought toward answers to these questions tends to take discrete steps rather than to evolve smoothly over time. A new school of ideas suddenly emerges as changes in the economy yield fresh insights and make existing doctrines obsolete. The new school eventually becomes the consensus view, to be pushed aside by the next wave of new ideas. This process continues today and its motivating force remains the same as that three centuries ago: to understand the economy so that we may use it wisely to achieve society's goals.

Irving Fisher

Irving Fisher was an American economist, health campaigner, and eugenicist, and one of the earliest American neoclassical economists, though he later rejected the underlying theory of general equilibrium, and his later work on debt deflation is instead considered in the Post-Keynesian school. Although he was perhaps the first celebrity economist, his reputation during his lifetime was irreparably harmed by his sanguine attitude immediately prior to the crash of 1929, and his theory of debt deflation was ignored in favor of the work of John Maynard Keynes. His reputation has since recovered in neoclassical economics since his work was popularized in the late 1950s (Hirshleifer 1958), and more widely due to an increased interest in debt deflation in the Late-2000s recession

Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman (July 31, 1912 - November 16, 2006) was an American economist, statistician, and a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. He is best known among scholars for his theoretical and empirical research, especially consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy.[1] He was an economic advisor to U.S. President Ronald Reagan. Over time, many governments practiced his restatement of a political philosophy that extolled the virtues of a free market economic system with little intervention by government. As a professor of the Chicago School of Economics, based at the University of Chicago, he had great influence in determining the research agenda of the entire profession. Friedman's many monographs, books, scholarly articles, papers, magazine columns, television programs, videos and lectures cover a broad range of topics of microeconomics, macroeconomics, economic history, and public policy issues. The Economist magazine praised him as "the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century…possibly of all of it"

Friedrich von Hayek

Friedrich August von Hayek CH (8 May 1899 - 23 March 1992), was an Austrian-born economist and philosopher known for his defence of classical liberalism and free-market capitalism against socialist and collectivist thought. He is considered by some to be one of the most important economists and political philosophers of the twentieth century.[1] Hayek's account of how changing prices communicate signals which ...