/Monday, March 12, 2007
Oh Dear,
I just spotted the entry by Raymond in response to my petulant whines to Rach that "economics is not something with too many false assumptions."
It's true that JC econs are often unrealistic and scare the pants of many JC students from wanting to study the subject, thinking that they will most probably be studying
"a pack of lies, and loads of math".Sometimes I wish that I could teach econs from a different aspect, because I love the innate philosophical aspect of the subject and it's rich history over hundreds of years.
Yes, economics is literally sprouted from philosophy. In fact, many important ideas in sociology/political science/economics/law/etc surrounding the individual and the state sprouted from philosophy.
After all, Adam Smith wrote his famous book in words (pretty cheem words) 350 years ago, not in data and numbers.
And so many economic ideas were spurn off by observation of social phenomenons (Especially those involving trade and the government) and later improvised into sophisticated economic models with all the math and stuff.
STATS and DATA is important because
"Numbers Do not lie", and merely acts to strengthens your reasonings.
And
HELLLLOOOO, do you know that OUR Sir Stamford Raffles so inspired by Adam Smith's radical ideas about competitive advantage and goods specialization for trade (His idea was considered pretty mad at that time, because mercantilism was all at rage during this period*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism*); that he managed to convince the EIC and the Queen to support his move to set up free trading ports in the East Indies???
Yes, Sir Stamford Raffles was one of the rare supporters of Adam Smith's book at that time....
See....Adam Smith "sorta" played a part in our founding as a free trading port....if not, we all would'nt be here, including pesky JC students *heh*
Okie, Jokes aside.
I have to admit that I was'nt expecting a response and I did'nt expect my dear hotchick to quote me per ser.
I agree with you about the part on behavioural economics, it's a very exciting area because it overlaps with psychology and goes back to the very basic fundamentals of SOCIAL SCIENCE:
"The study of human behaviour"
Ever since David Ricardo started his waxing philosophical thoughts about people's expectation, and his famous "ricardo equivilence" theory a few hundred years ago, it spark off numerous debates about people making rational choices.
Do humans make rational choices?
It's scary cos it challenges many nice economic models with complicated maths that may serve to be useless (especially those models nicely done up to help the government in its policy making) just because they could'nt predict human behaviour accurately.
Huge debate, ongoing.... nevertheless, economic models are still important,
The economic models we often study gets debunked gazzillion times and are always being improvised by research academics, and then their new models would get criticised upon and later, improved upon.....*you get the idea*
To give a over-simplfied idea of "rational expectations" that may seemly be related to behavioural economics:
"When we recieve recieve our ERS from gah-men $$$ a few years back, the GST went up to 5%, and the lower class had to tighten their spending while some of us may be entice to save rather then spend for a while; when we recieve recieve our progress package$$$ last year, we sorta see-it-coming already (the GST increase), and it did! by 2 %......The coporate tax cutdown and GST increase is bound to have effects on spending/saving rates.....So the next time GE comes by, and we get $$$ again, what would you expect?
A free lunch?"
Oh, And I wanna add that my ex-econometric prof is now in NTU! *surprise~* I saw him in the papers and he was featured cos he co-wrote an econometric book with another NTU prof and one of the insights featured in the book was whether the GST increase and coporate tax cut would just simply offset each other without achieving significant econimic growth.
*ahem* Yes, according to them, you could read their book and figure out if their data used is strong enough to support their argument.
It's a zero-sum game, *you're* not growing the pie; the poor loses while the rich gains.
Talk about closing up the widening gap in wealth inequality.
Oh, by the way, I learnt that stats figures over the past 100 years have shown that the income gap btw the poor and the rich have been widening and shows no sign of improvement.
Some experts have claim that it's a inevitable consequence as countries strive towards economic developement.
it just ain't right @ Monday, March 12, 2007
