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twentieth centuries, dissimulation in reaction to religious persecution and the enforcement of orthodoxy was a widespread practice.5 With the growth of toleration, liberty of conscience, and intellectual freedom in the wake of the revolutions in England, America, France, and continental Europe, religious dissimulation largely disappeared. It was
May 20, 2022 · During the 1980s, prominent international relations scholars in the United States argued that the economic chaos of recent history were due to declining US hegemony. 30 Gilpin and Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations; Keohane, After Hegemony. In some respects, this analysis seems apt.
- Trade. Trade is the flow of goodsand services over borders. For example, an American streaming media service that operates in dozens of countries.
- Financial Markets. Markets for currencies, securities and other financial instruments that operate over borders. For example, the ability of American investors to buy Canadian stocks and vice versa.
- Foreign Direct Investment. Investments by foreign firms in businesses that they control within your borders. For example, a Japanese car manufacturer that builds a factory in Mexico.
- Soft Power. Soft poweris ability for one nation to influence another without threat of force. For example, a nation that educates the future leaders of many nations in its great universities.
In the aftermath of World War II, economic planners looked to Great Britain for an example of how countries in the developing world might achieve the same transformation. The American economist and political theorist Walt Whitman Rostow (1916–2003), in The Stages of Economic Growth (1960), attempted a general theory of how economies ...
- Overview
- Definition
- Historical development of economics
Written byMark Blaug
Mark Blaug
Visiting Professor of Economics, University of Exeter, England. Emeritus Professor of Economics, University of Buckingham, England. Emeritus Professor of the Economics of Education, Institute of Education, University of London. Author of Economic Theory in Retrospect.
Fact-checked byThe Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors.
No one has ever succeeded in neatly defining the scope of economics. Many have agreed with Alfred Marshall, a leading 19th-century English economist, that economics is “a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life; it examines that part of individual and social action which is most closely connected with the attainment, and with the use of the material requisites of wellbeing”—ignoring the fact that sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists frequently study exactly the same phenomena. In the 20th century, English economist Lionel Robbins defined economics as “the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between (given) ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.” In other words, Robbins said that economics is the science of economizing. While his definition captures one of the striking characteristics of the economist’s way of thinking, it is at once too wide (because it would include in economics the game of chess) and too narrow (because it would exclude the study of the national income or the price level). Perhaps the only foolproof definition is that attributed to Canadian-born economist Jacob Viner: economics is what economists do.
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Difficult as it may be to define economics, it is not difficult to indicate the sorts of questions that concern economists. Among other things, they seek to analyze the forces determining prices—not only the prices of goods and services but the prices of the resources used to produce them. This involves the discovery of two key elements: what governs the way in which human labour, machines, and land are combined in production and how buyers and sellers are brought together in a functioning market. Because prices of the various things must be interrelated, economists therefore ask how such a “price system” or “market mechanism” hangs together and what conditions are necessary for its survival.
The effective birth of economics as a separate discipline may be traced to the year 1776, when the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. There was, of course, economics before Smith: the Greeks made significant contributions, as did the medieval scholastics, and from the 15th to the 18th century an enormous amount of pamphlet literature discussed and developed the implications of economic nationalism (a body of thought now known as mercantilism). It was Smith, however, who wrote the first full-scale treatise on economics and, by his magisterial influence, founded what later generations were to call the “English school of classical political economy,” known today as classical economics.
Adam Smith, paste medallion by James Tassie, 1787; in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh.
Aug 23, 2023 · Examples of Inflation, Disinflation and Deflation. Let’s visually break down the difference between inflation, disinflation and deflation with an example. Below we graph the year-over-year percentage change in the CPI from April 2008 to October 2009 in the U.S., during the Great Recession and the first few months of recovery.
For example, it took the NBER committee a year to announce the beginning and end dates of the most recent US recession. This is understandable. The decision process involves establishing a broad decline in economic activity over an extended period of time, after compiling and sifting through many variables, which are often subject to revisions after their initial announcement.
