Diane Coyle, "Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be" (Princeton UP, 2021)
New Books in Economics
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Are We Missing Important Questions in Economics?
Economics was created in the 19 thirties, at a time when positivism was dominant philosophy. The analysis that we do depends on the concept of efficiency which isn't like engineering efficiency or plumbing efficiency. And it's actually an ethical standard. It says you can't claim a, again, an efficiency, unless you have not made anybody else, anybody worse. That never happens in real life. Public policy always involves trade offs and conflicts. Yet here we are in the fundamentals of economic theory ruling out the ability to talk about distribution in our criterion for improvement.
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