Speaking of economics : how to get in the conversation / Arjo Klamer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Klamer, Arjo.

Series:

Economics as social theory

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Economics.

Physical Description:

xxii, 199 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

London ; New York : Routledge, 2007.

Summary:

Based on themes emerging from his popular Conversations with Economists (1983), Arjo Klamer once again distinguishes himself from other academic economists by writing about the profession - and its foibles - in plain English. How is it that a discipline that so permeates daily life is at once "soft" and scientific, powerful and ignored, noble and disdained? Here is an attempt to make sense of all that. Whether you are a student, academician, journalist, practicing economist, or interested outsider, Speaking of Economics will get you interested in a conversation about economics.

Economists disagree so fundamentally that conversation becomes impossible: students of the most prestigious graduate schools emerge with significantly different views; mathematical equations become more real than the everyday world. And, after all these years, the Nobel Prize-worthy profession cannot tell us, say, how a 1 percent increase in the price of electricity will affect the utility industry. How can this be a science? Here, an economist reconciles all of this with an intimacy and readability rarely seen in books concerning economics - without eschewing academic methodology. We come away with the sense that, despite its strangeness and pitfalls, economics is scientific and powerful and noble.

Contents:

Exordium: getting into the conversation xii

1 The strangeness of the discipline 1

2 Economics is a conversation or, better, a bunch of conversations 15

3 What it takes to be an academic dog, or the culture of the academic conversation 37

4 It's the attention, stupid! 51

5 A good scientific conversation, or contribution thereto, is truthful and meaningful and serves certain interests 66

6 The art of economic persuasion: about rhetoric and all that 91

7 Why disagreements among economists persist, why economists need to brace themselves for differences within their simultaneous conversations and their conversations over time, and why they may benefit from knowing about classicism, modernism, and postmodernism 126

8 How and why everyday conversations differ from academic ones and how and why academic conversations clash with political ones 154

Peroratio: why the science of economics is not all that strange 176.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [187]-190) and index.

ISBN:

0415395100

0415395119

9780415395113

9780415395106

9780203964484

0203964489

OCLC:

70911189