The Student's Guide to Writing Economics

Robert H. Neugeboren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135993030
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

Understanding the way economists see the world is a necessary step on the way to good economics writing. This book guides students through the means and methods of economics writing, by taking a step by step approach investigating:

• the keys needed to succeed as a writer of economics and an overview of the writing process from beginning to end
• the basic methods economists use to analyze data and communicate their ideas
• suggestions for finding and focusing one's topic, including standard economic sources and techniques for doing economic research
• how to write paper
• ways of citing sources and creating a bibliography.

It also contains useful appendices, which provide details of statistical sources and relevant electronic indices. Used as a standard guide for economics students at Harvard University, this book is of immense practical use to economics students the world over.

Acknowledgments

This guide was developed in conjunction with the Economics Tutorial Program at Harvard University, with support and assistance from The Harvard Writing Project. Nancy Sommers, Sosland Director of Expository Writing, proposed the idea in 1999, and I was asked to write the guide, which has since been distributed to the sophomores in the department each year. Kerry Walk, then Assistant Director of the Writing Project, saw the project through from inception to completion, commented on drafts, gave advice at every stage, and ultimately added the section on “Formatting and documentation” (Chapter 5). Christopher Foote, then Assistant Professor of Economics and Director of Undergraduate Studies, wrote part of Chapter 4, and Mireille Jacobson made substantial contributions to the section on “Writing economically” (Chapter 1), and she compiled the original appendices. Oliver Hart, Michael Murray, Lorenzo Isla, Tuan Min Li, Allison Morantz, and Stephen Weinberg also gave very helpful comments. Rajiv Shankar updated the appendices and prepared the manuscript for printing. Special thanks to Anita Mortimer, with regrets for her recent passing.

Introduction: The economic approach

LIST OF SUB-TOPICS Economics and the problem of scarcity The assumption of rationality The theory of incentives Types of writing assignments Plan of this guide

Economists study everything from money and prices to child rearing and the environment. They analyze small-scale decision-making and large-scale international policy-making. They compile data about the past and make predictions about the future. Many economic ideas have currency in everyday life, cropping up in newspapers, magazines, and policy debates. The amount you pay every month to finance a car or new home purchase will depend on interest rates. Business people make investment plans based on expectations of future demand, and policy-makers devise budgets to achieve a desired macroeconomic equilibrium.

While the range of topics that interest economists is vast, there is a unique approach to knowledge, something common to the way all economists see the world. Economists share certain assumptions about how the economy works, and they use standard methods for analyzing data and communicating their ideas. The purpose of this guide is to help you to think and write like an economist.

ECONOMICS AND THE PROBLEM OF SCARCITY

Since its beginnings as “the dismal science,” economics has been preoccupied with the problem of scarcity. The hours in a day, the money in one’s pocket, the food the earth can supply are all limited; spending resources on one activity necessarily comes at the expense of some other, foregone opportunity. Scarcity provides economics with its central problem: how to make choices in the context of constraint.

Accordingly, economists ask questions such as: How does a consumer choose a bundle of commodities, given her income and prices? How does a country choose to meet its objectives, given its national budget? How do decision-makers allocate scarce resources among alternative activities with different uses?

While this central economic problem may be rather narrow, the range of topics that interest economists is vast. Indeed, insofar as it can be characterized as choice under constraint, any kind of behavior falls within the scope of economic analysis. As Lord Lionel Robbins (1984), one of the great economists of the twentieth century, put it:

We do not say that the production of potatoes is economic activity and the production of philosophy is not. We say rather that, in so far as either kind of activity involves the relinquishment of other desired alternatives, it has its economic aspect. There are no limitations on the subject matter of Economic Science save this.

It should come as no surprise that economists are sometimes called “imperialists” by other social scientists for their encroachment on fields that traditionally belong to other disciplines. For instance, historians studying the migration patterns of eighteenth-century European peasants have explained the movement out of the countryside and into the cities in terms of broad social and cultural factors: the peasants were subjects of changing times, swept along by the force of history. By contrast, economists, such as Samuel L. Popkin (1979), have attributed urban migration patterns to the trade-offs faced and choices made by individual agents; from this perspective, the peasants’ behavior was rational.

THE ASSUMPTION OF RATIONALITY

Economists approach a wide range of topics with the assumption that the behavior under investigation is best understood as if it were rational (though we know that not all behavior is, in fact, rational) and that the best explanations, models, and theories we construct take rationality as the norm. Rationality, in the words of Frank Hahn, is the “weak causal proposition” that sets all economic analyses in motion. “Economics can be distinguished from other social sciences by the belief that most (all?) behavior can be explained by assuming that agents have stable, well-defined preferences and make rational choices consistent with those preferences” (Colin Camerer and Richard Thaler, 1995).

Rationality, in the standard sense of the economist, means that agents prefer more of what they want to less. This may seem like a rather strong proposition, insofar as it seems to imply that human behavior is ne...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Appendices
• APPENDIX A: FIELDS IN ECONOMICS1
• APPENDIX B: ECONOMICS ON THE INTERNET
• APPENDIX C: ELECTRONIC INDICES TO PERIODICAL LITERATURE
• References
• Index