Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Conceptualizing economics

Arnold Kling has a really thoughtful essay critiquing modern economics for being overly concerned with the allocation of a fixed stock of resources, using camping trips as an analogy:
A camping trip is, in fact, the opposite of an economic setting. The camping-trip setting is one of high endowment, low improvement. Close to 100 percent of the goods and services needed to make the camping trip enjoyable are provided exogenously prior to our embarking on the camping trip.
In this article one glimpses a hint of the increasingly obvious fact that many libertarian economists have more in common with liberal steady-state theorists than is typically appreciated. Both refuse to conceptualize debt-fueled growth as a meaningful an sustainable path towards creating value.