Re: -Reply: What is Economics?

[Bruce McFarling <brmcf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 27 Feb 1995, GREG RANSOM wrote:

>
> Economics has from its origins been concerned with how an extended order of
> human interaction comes into existence through a process of variation,
> winnowing and sifting far suppassing our vision or or capacity of design ..
> Modern economics explains how an extended order can come into being, and
> how it itself constitutes an information-gathering process, able to call up,
> and to put to use, widely dispersed information that no central planning
> agency, let along any individual, could know as a whoel, possess or control.
> The density of occupations of the world was made possible by trade.  A
> cahin reaction began:  the greater the density of population, leading to
> discovery of opportunities for specialisation, or division of labor, led to
> yet futher increases of population and per capita income that made possible
> another increase in the population. ... ... ...
...
> Greg Ransom
> UC-Riverside
>
>
	The only problem here is that what you are
describing is technological progress, and technological
progress antedates civilization, while even under
civilization markets were not critical distributive
institutions within local economies until
relatively recently: say, the last 500 years or so.
	One of the reasons for confusing market
insitutions and their consequences with technological
growth is the exponential illusion: exponential growth
looks like its accelerating, when in fact all that has
happened is an increase in the base: there appears to
have been faster growth over the last 500 years, while
market-oriented nations have come to dominance, but much
of this is the same rate of growth on a larger base.  A
second is a history, since the enlightnemnet, of making
up fictional prehistories to support current theories,
and this is a bad habit that is still too prevalent in
economics.

Virtually,

Bruce McFarling, Knoxville
brmcf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx