Fields of contemporary economics

Although news about the stock market has come to dominate financial journalism, only since the late 20th century was the stock market recognized as an institution suitable for economic analysis. This recognition turned on a changed understanding of the “efficient market hypothesis,” which held that securities prices in an efficient stock market were inherently unpredictable—that is, an investment in the stock market was, for all but insider traders, equivalent to gambling in a casino. (An efficient stock market was one in which all information relevant to the discounted present value of stocks was freely available to all participants in the market and hence was immediately incorporated into their buying and selling plans; stock market prices were unpredictable because every fact that made them predictable had already been acted on.) In the famous economists’ joke, there is no point in picking up a $10 bill lying on the sidewalk, because if it were real, someone else would already have picked it up.

The growth of financial markets, the deregulation of international capital markets, and the unprecedented availability of financial data gradually undermined the efficient market hypothesis. By the 1990s there had been enough “bubbles” in stock prices to remind economists of the excessive volatility of stock markets (and to prompt Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan to point to the market’s “irrational exuberance” when share prices hit new peaks late in the decade). The securities markets seemed anything but efficient. In any case, finance is an area where facts can be highly ambiguous but where the number of people desperately interested in the nature of those facts will guarantee the further growth of financial economics.

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Ludwig von Mises.

Ludwig von Mises Institute

There are different schools of thought in economics, each with its own journals and conferences. One, the Austrian school, now rooted in the United States, with leading centres at New York University and George Mason University, originated in the works of Carl Menger, Friedrich von Wieser, and Böhm-Bawerk, all of whom emphasized utility as a component of value. Its free market precepts were brought to the United States by Ludwig Mises and the well-known author of The Road to Serfdom (1944), Friedrich A. Hayek.

Charles Darwin’s influence can be seen in all of the social sciences, and another alternative school, evolutionary economics—like much of the literature in economics, psychology, and sociology—builds on analogies to evolutionary processes. Also drawing heavily on game theory, it is primarily concerned with economic change, innovation, and dynamic competition. This is not, of course, the first time that economists have flirted with Darwinian biology. Both Veblen and Alfred Marshall were convinced that biology and not mechanics offered the road to theoretical progress in economics, and, while this belief in biological thinking died out in the early years of the 20th century, it has returned to prominence in evolutionary economics.

Pairing his critique of central planning with a defence of free markets, Hayek became a sophisticated evolutionary economist whose advocacy of markets drew attention to the weakest element in mainstream economics: the assumption that economic agents are always perfectly informed of alternative opportunities. A follower of Mises and Hayek, American economist Israel Kirzner developed this line of thinking into a unique Austrian theory of entrepreneurship (involving spontaneous learning and decision making at the individual level) that emphasized a tendency toward economic equilibrium.

Yet another school outside the mainstream is Sraffian economics. As an offshoot of general equilibrium theory, Sraffian economics purports to explain the determination of prices by means of the technological relationships between inputs and outputs without invoking the preferences of consumers that neoclassical economists rely on so heavily. Moreover, Sraffian theory is said to recover the classical economic tradition of Smith and Ricardo, which Sraffians believe has been deliberately buried by neoclassical orthodoxy. All of this stems from Piero Sraffa’s The Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (1962), whose 100 or so pages have attracted thousands of pages of elucidation, though the true meaning of Sraffian economics still remains somewhat elusive. Be that as it may, Sraffian economics is a good example of the unequal global diffusion of economic specialization; while it is recognized as a minority school of thought in Europe, Sraffian economics is virtually unknown in American academic circles.

Radical economics, including feminist economics, is better characterized by what it opposes than by what it advocates. A glance at the pages of the Review of Radical Political Economics and Feminist Economics may cause some to wonder if these specialized concerns should even be considered as economics. That question leads back to the notion that economics is what economists do; in that light, heterodox economics, as exemplified by these and similar networks of dissenters, is indeed economics.

Other principal fields in economics include economic history, health economics, cultural economics, economics of education, demographic economics, the study of nonprofit organizations, economic regulation, business management, comparative economic systems, environmental economics, urban and regional economics, and spatial economics.

Economics has always been taught in conjunction with economic history, but the relationship between these two fields has never been an easy one, and to this day economics departments in the United States include economic historians. In most of Europe, however, economists and economic historians are not joined together institutionally. Although economic historians have won Nobel Prizes (Simon Kuznets in 1971, and Robert Fogel and Douglass North in 1993), most economists do not aspire to study in this area.

The growth of public interest in certain areas affects economists as much as other people. It is not surprising therefore that environmental economics has been an emerging subfield of economics. Marshall and his principal student, Arthur Pigou, created the subject of welfare economics around the theme of the negative “externalities” or spillovers (such as pollution) caused by the growth of big business. Should such “diseconomies of scale” be controlled by administrative regulation, or should firms be made to pay for them by selling them licenses to pollute? Global warming has dramatized the importance of these questions, and the concerns of environmental economics were priorities of applied economists at the start of the 21st century.

In the 1960s the American “war on poverty” and concerns about schooling brought the economics of education to the fore. That was the decade of interest in human capital theory, and since then the growing health bill of Western countries has drawn similar attention to health economics as a specialization. This is unlikely to change in the years to come, and health economics is perhaps the field in the applied economics of the future with the most promising potential. One might have thought that the same would apply to spatial economics or the economics of location (see location theory). After all, what could be more important than the location at which economic activity is carried out? How can the marketing of products be studied without paying attention to the role of location? But although spatial economics has a long and rich history of scholarship (including the work of Johann Heinrich von Thünen and Alfred Weber), it has never attracted the steady interest of economists. Why that is so is a big unanswered question.

Lastly, there is the influence from the field of business management. Developments in higher education have fostered the study of economics within business schools (as opposed to maintaining distinct departments of economics). This trend has been encouraged by the institutions that hire new economists, such as banks, brokerage firms, and governments. As a result, many colleges and universities have reduced their economics faculties while building up their management faculties. The fields of business administration and business economics have their own gurus, but only a few (such as American economists Herbert Simon and Alfred Chandler) straddle both economics and management. By and large, these are different worlds, and only time will tell whether economics and management will one day merge into some new, more comprehensive subject in the study of business governance. What is certain is that economics will remain a vital branch of knowledge, as central to curricula of universities as it is to the conduct of human interaction, with an ongoing proliferation of new theories, schools, and subfields.

Mark Blaug and Howard R. Vane (eds.), Who’s Who in Economics, 4th ed. (2003), contains biographical information on 1,500 economists, based on their frequency of citation in economics journals. Mark Blaug, Great Economists Before Keynes (1986, reissued 1997), provides thumbnail sketches of the ideas of 200 eminent economists. Douglas Greenwald (ed.), The McGraw-Hill Encyclopaedia of Economics, 2nd ed. (1994); and Phillip Anthony O’Hara (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Political Economy, 2 vol. (1998, reissued 2001), are two accessible sources of reference addressed to students coming to economics for the first time.

There is the more comprehensive John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman (eds.), The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, 4 vol. (1987, reissued 2002), but the level of readability and technical difficulty varies greatly from entry to entry. For a more accessible overview, see Roger E. Backhouse, The Penguin History of Economics (2002).

Representative introductory textbooks are Paul A. Samuelson and William D. Nordhaus, Economics, 18th ed. (2005); Richard G. Lipsey and K. Alec Chrystal, Economics, 10th ed. (2004); and William J. Baumol and Alan S. Blinder, Economics: Principles and Policy, 9th ed. (2003).