- Project Syndicate * Clair Brown is Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Work, Technology, and Society at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Buddhist Economics: An Enlightened Approach to the
Dismal Science. * Simon S?llstr?m is the research coordinator for the Sustainable Shared-Prosperity Policy Index (SSPI) at the University of California, Berkeley.
Scour the pool of practitioners of the
dismal science, and you will find supporters and detractors for almost every economic theory, from free markets to socialism.
So why is the
dismal science suddenly guilty of issuing overly optimistic forecasts that set the whole world up for disappointment?
The moral quality of greed is further effaced, and material acquisition becomes a behavioral assumption in the
dismal science of the two Mills.
The usual
dismal science of scarcity and marginal utility.
But this way of trying to combine parliamentary government with plebiscitary democracy has failed." It is with some regret that I have to agree with Runciman when he suggests that what is required for now is acceptance of a 'miserable compromise' and that we "get on with reforming the democracy we have, so that the next compromise is a better one." If as Carlyle suggested economic is a "
dismal science", then this makes politics a more dismal one Kevin Cryan Radford Let's be British and buy British FRENCH, Italian and Spanish fishing boats in British waters stealing our fish.
No wonder economics - the study of money, trade and business - is often called the "
dismal science".
Economics is traditionally known as the "
dismal science," and a series of economists have proved it in recent weeks by reminding Idahoans that, while things are mostly going well now, the economy is cyclical and a recession is likely at some point, perhaps by 2020.
In Nasar's dramatic narrative of these discoverers, we witness men and women responding to personal crises, world wars, revolutions, economic upheavals and each other's ideas to turn back Malthus and transform the
dismal science into a triumph over mankind's hitherto age old destiny of misery and early death.
NOTWITHSTANDING its track record, economics is still haunted by the perception that it is a
dismal science. Criticism is rooted in the boom and bust cycle with its rising frequency and multiplying societal impacts.
Kennedy School of Government, is the author of Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the
Dismal Science.
Incidentally, when economists refer to economics as "the
dismal science," they almost always get the origin of that term wrong.