Talk:Mainstream economics

Economics Start‑class Low‑importance

	Business and economics portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Economics, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Economics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.EconomicsWikipedia:WikiProject EconomicsTemplate:WikiProject EconomicsEconomics
Start	This article has been rated as Start-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Is Austrian Economics Really Heterodox???

I think, and many scholars agree, that the Austrian School of Economics is the precursor of the Chicago school of economics (Considered today as the ultimate mainstream).

Check out Austrian School. Its main link is through its emphasis on pricing theory and its "radical" free market philosophy. But whereas Austrians can sometimes seem to write like borderline anarchists, the Chicago school really doesn't attack the State in quite the same way. Certainly many disciples of Ludwig von Mises and (particularly) Murray Rothbard would be appalled by the Chicago School's rejection of the gold standard as a topic of serious academic study. And many (most?) Austrians do not talk to fiat-currency-supporting monetarists, who are close cousins of the Chicago School. Austrian economics basically got cut off from Chicago after Rothbard and now forms a small cul de sac in economic theory, without much (or indeed any) mainstream academic funding or support. Chicago School (and the associated Washington Consensus) does receive very generous funding from many institutional and government sources.--Lagrandebanquesucre (talk) 10:48, 7 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Behavorial economics

I think it should be more clearly mentioned that behavioral economics is well in the mainstream these days but I do not have any source for the claim and I am not sure where to put it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.97.58.55 (talk) 18:45, 21 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Critical section

Renamed to Critical section from something a section titled Future, which was not really illustrative of anything. It contained critical or alternative information anyway, and I added a few sentences about Ecological economics and some ref/citations. Also moved it toward the bottom of the page where logically a critical section would be. skip sievert (talk) 13:21, 6 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Nothingness award of the week

Count on the state-worshiping "economics" crowd at Wikipedia to come up with this for the article lead: "Mainstream economics is a loose term used to refer to the non-heterodox economics taught in prominent universities."

Translated into reality, this is, "Mainstream economics is a loose term used to refer to economics which is not not mainstream."

Not not uninformative. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.255.214.2 (talk) 22:12, 9 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Replacement of footnote source at end of 1st para.

The source replaced is: Clark, B. (1998). Political-economy: A comparative approach. Westport, CT: Praeger.

A more specialized source was substituted instead on the theory that it is likely to be more accurate as to that the subject of that reference. P.S. I could not find anything in the google version of the above reference supportive of what the text asserted. --Thomasmeeks (talk) 21:20, 18 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The real and traditional distinction.

The real distinction is between bourgeois = mainstream and scientific = socialist economics. Heterodox was understood to be some amalgam of these as in the so-called mixed, i.e. heterodox economy. This was understood in the prior century when these terms were coined and the first wave of socialism had not yet turned into what is left of it now when a second wave has already started. I distinctly remember and still have texts such as Samuelson (10th Edition) where the distinction is discussed. The hallmark of so-called mainstream or bourgeois economics is the assumption that capitalism and bourgeois democracy are the ends to which historical development drives and halts having reached its completed form. Heterodox, non-bourgeois economics then is the retraction of this assumption and is therefore identical with general and includes mathematical economics, with the assumption of the universality of capitalist relations of productions removed and the problem of economic allocation of social resources treated in its full generality. The current text appears to be completely oblivious of this. It is not identical with Marxist or "mixed economy" models but it was traditionally largely taken to be so. What's here now is a "false regression" to an oblivion that is a new state of ignorance/obfuscation of the basic flat fact of bourgeois vs. general perspective. 72.228.177.92 (talk) 10:43, 14 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]