Tag Archives: Economics

By: Lykke E. Andersen*

There has been a lot of focus lately on the extreme levels of gender inequality in economics (e.g. Economics is the most dismal of sciences in terms of gender inequality). According to the IDEAS/RePEc ranking of more than 50 thousand economists in the world, only 19% of registered economists are women, and they are much rarer than that among the top ranked economists (https://ideas.repec.org/top/#authorscountry).

Typically, there are only about a handful of women among the top 100 economists in any particular country. In the Netherlands there is just 1, in the United States 3, in Canada 4, in Sweden 5, in the UK, Germany, Norway and Italy 8, and Denmark seems to hold the record with 10. (Do let me know in the comments below if you find a country with more than 10 women among the top 100 economists according to RePEc, because I didn’t check the countries with names that were too unfamiliar to me).

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“When the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten, and the last stream poisoned, you will realize that you cannot eat money,” Native American saying

“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” Brundtland Report

It is undeniable that our current way of life is unsustainable; If every country consumed resources and created waste at the same per person rate as the United States, we would need three to five planets to survive. Part of the problem lies in the fact that economics—the major discipline advising global and national policy—has failed to include the environment in its calculations. To rectify this problem, different methods have been proposed, so as to make predictions and come up with better ways of managing the planet’s resources without compromising the future.

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In a perfectly rational world, Ted the taxi driver works long hours on days with many customers and goes home early on bad days to save money on driving. On the other side of the world, Mexican farming couple Carlos and Verónica send their children to the new school built in the next town, because they know that education will lead to a job that will make up for the time not spent on the farm. Ted, Carlos and Verónica demonstrate what is a central tenet of classical economic theory : the belief in homo economicus, the rational economic man—a being that makes fully calculated decisions in a rational manner to achieve the best possible outcome for himself. Read More »

“Games lubricate the body and the mind.” Benjamin Franklin

Classroom games can be an excellent way of introducing economic concepts. Well-designed games, or classroom experiments, can help students obtain an intuitive understanding of a concept before it is introduced formally, thus increasing the understanding and comprehension of the theoretical concept.

This list, compiled by Greg Delemeester and Jurgen Brauer, contains descriptions of about 170 different classroom games, classified according to the topic they illuminate (e.g. externalities, wealth distribution, or international trade). The list also provides links to electronic versions of the papers describing each game in detail.

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“What’s the difference between a recession and a depression,” asks a member of the public. “A recession is when you lose your job; a depression is when I lose mine,” replies an economist.

This is just one of numerous little jokettes that colour the pages of The Cartoon Introduction to Economics—a brilliant must-have for any student or teacher of economics or, indeed, anyone else interested in getting to know or simply recapping on the basics of a field that is currently positioned at the center of local, national and global decision-making. Read More »

One of the primary lessons in Economics 101 is that of the rules of supply and demand in a market economy and their relationship to price. The basics being that the price of a product will adjust depending on the level of demand and level of supply in any given market and will eventually settle on an equilibrium when supply balances with demand.

Now we don’t need to go into all the details, as, for the sake of argument, we are interested in only one theoretical law governing this relationship. It states that should the market for a particular good get over-saturated with supply, then the price of this good will keep going down until a point where producers will stop making it or scale down their operations as they will no longer be as profitable. Read More »