Sex, Drugs & Economics

Economic ThinkingA lot of nonsense pours out of television and radio speakers, peppers newspaper and magazine articles, and colors political speeches and legislative initiatives. Dunderheads deliver absurd economic diagnoses but knowledgeable experts fear to contradict them. Economics has its roots as a science in the skepticism of Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume (1748-1891). Its original name, "political economy," is a better description of what it is about than the contemporary word, "economics." Economics is not a subject or a corpus of knowledge or a set of facts, but rather a whole way of thinking about and looking at social issues, political problems and business or financial challenges. Economists concern themselves with how people try to get what they want when their resources are scarce. What choices do they make and how? What happens under the pressure of change? Nothing could be more practical, so why do many people consider economists to be ivory tower eccentrics, out of touch with the mainstream? Although economists do rely heavily on complex mathematics to describe the world as they see it, their concerns are not at all remote. Recent economic research...