Re: -Reply: What is Economics?

[McClintockBrent%faculty%Carthage@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

In an exchange between Laura Ebert and Bill Mitchell about what economics is
about:

>Laura Ebert says:

>Economics is about how resources are to be produced and distributed
>for HUMAN SURVIVAL - cause unlike (to a matter of degree) animals that
>is how our species reproduces itself.  Economics is not about MONEY
>OR PROFIT, ULTIMATELY, but about the reproduction of the human
>species.

and Bill Mitchell says:
>well maybe that is what _economies_ should be structured for and to serve
>the goal of, Laura, but i am not sure that _economics_ is about that.

It strikes me that the substantivist v. formalist views of economics from the
econ. anthropology debate of the 1960s is relevant here. Laura is taking the
substantivist view of economics as being about material provisioning; bill is
taking the formalist view of economics as economizing behavior in a market
economy. Bill's view of how most economics is practiced in the main today is
a subset of the umbrella definition that Laura is using.  Much of heterodoxy
operates within the substantivist definition, orthodoxy within formalism.

Cheers,
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