Fifty Major Economists

Steven Pressman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136026966
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

An introduction to the life, work and ideas of the people who have shaped the economic landscape from the sixteenth century to the present day. Now in a third edition, it considers how major economists might have viewed challenges such as the continuing economic slump, high unemployment and the sovereign debt problems which face the world today, it includes entries on:

• Paul Krugman

• Hyman Minsky

• John Maynard Keynes

• Adam Smith

• Irving Fisher

• James Buchanan

Fifty Major Economists contains brief biographical information on each featured economist and an explanation of their major contributions to economics, along with simple illustrations of their ideas. With reference to the recent work of living economists, guides to the best of recent scholarship and a glossary of terms, Fifty Major Economists is an ideal resource for students of economics.

Steven Pressman is Professor of Economics and Finance at Monmouth University. He has published around 120 articles in refereed journals and as book chapters, and has authored, or edited 13 books, including Women in the Age of Economic Transformation, Economics and Its Discontents, Alternative Theories of the State, and Leading Contemporary Economists.

GLOSSARY

Absolute advantage A theory holding that whichever country can produce a good more efficiently will export that good (also see comparative advantage).

Accelerator A theory of investment which holds that investment increases whenever the economy expands.

Adding up problem This concerns whether summing the marginal productivity of all inputs used by the firm will equal the value of output, and thus whether sales proceeds can pay factors of production.

Adverse selection A problem with insurance systems. Those people who tend to take out insurance are more likely than the population in general to file claims.

Arbitrage The simultaneous purchase and sale of some asset in two different markets in order to make money from the price differential.

Asymmetric information Differences in knowledge between two parties to some trade or transaction.

Balanced budget multiplier The economic impact of equal cuts in taxes and government spending (or equal increases in both). Cuts reduce GDP by the amount of the cut, while increases increase GDP by the amount of the increase.

Behavioral economics An approach that seeks to provide economics with more realistic psychological foundations by focusing on actual human decision-making and behavior.

Cambridge controversy A dispute between Cambridge, England, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the mid-twentieth century concerning how to measure capital.

Cantillon effect The differential impact of money on the economy depending upon how money enters the economy and who gets the money.

Cardinal utility The belief that consumers can distinguish how much more they prefer one bundle of goods to another bundle of goods (see ordinal utility).

Class struggle A conflict between capitalists and workers.

Cliometrics The use of advanced statistical techniques to test hypotheses about economic history.

Comparative advantage The doctrine that it is relative efficiencies (or relative inefficiencies) that determine the goods a country will export (see absolute advantage).

Complementary goods Two or more goods usually consumed together, like gasoline and automobiles.

Conspicuous consumption Expenditure made to impress others rather than improve one’s well-being.

Constant returns to scale This occurs when an increase in inputs leads to a proportional increase in outputs.

Consumer sovereignty The belief that each consumer is the best judge of her own well-being and so everyone should be allowed complete freedom in purchasing goods.

Consumption function The relationship between consumer spending and income.

Contract curve A curve within the Edgeworth Box connecting the points at which two individuals‘ or two countries’ indifference curves are tangent.

Correlation coefficient A measure of the relationship between two economic variables, or the extent that they move together.

Cost–benefit analysis A tool for evaluating investment projects and government spending programs by comparing all the benefits that will result from the project and all the costs of the project.

Creative destruction The process by which new innovation and technological breakthroughs come to destroy old products and production processes.

Cross-price elasticity Measures the (percentage) change in quantity bought of some good as a result of some (percentage) change in the price of another good.

Cumulative causation A positive or negative feedback mechanism involving two or more variables, where increases in one variable lead to increases in the second variable, which increases the first variable again, etc.

Differential theory of rent The belief that the rent on any plot of land is determined by the difference between the productivity of that plot and the productivity of the least fertile land.

Diminishing marginal utility The belief that the satisfaction received from consuming a good will decline with each additional unit of the good that is consumed.

Diminishing returns When additional workers (or other factors of production) produce less than the previous workers (or factor) hired produced.

Division of labor Specialization in the production process whereby tasks are divided into small operations and individual workers are assigned to do just one task.

Dual labor market hypothesis The theory that there are two different labor markets in developed countries – one for skilled workers and one for unskilled workers.

Dumping The practice of charging less for some good abroad than the firm charges in its domestic market.

Econometrics The part of economics that measures economic relationships using statistical techniques.

Economies of scale Reductions in the cost of producing goods as a result of producing larger quantities of the goods.

Edgeworth box A diagram which combines the indifference curves of two individuals or two countries in order to determine the outcome of their attempts to trade with each other.

Efficiency wages Wages set by firms above the market-clearing level in the expectation that they will lead to greater effort and efficiency by workers.

Efficient markets hypothesis The belief that the price of assets traded in financial markets contains all available information and that it is impossible to consistently make above-average returns.

Elasticity of demand The percentage change in consumer purchases divided by the percentage change in price of a good. This shows how much sales change given a price change.

Elasticity of substitution A measure of how much businesses will change their use of inputs into the production process as a result of changes in the cost of buying those inputs. If the elasticity of substitution is zero, factors of production are always used in fixed proportions no matter how expensive the cost of some inputs becomes. If it is greater than zero, then higher wages will lead businesses to use more machinery and less labor.

Equation of exchange M...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• You May Also Be Interested in the Following Routledge Student Reference Titles
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Alphabetical list of contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Thomas Mun (1571-1641)
• William Petty (1623-87)
• Richard Cantillon (1687?-1734?)
• François Quesnay (1694-1774)
• David Hume (1711-76)
• Adam Smith (1723-90)
• Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)
• Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834)
• David Ricardo (1772-1823)
• Antoine Augustin Cournot (1801-77)
• John Stuart Mill (1806-73)
• Karl Marx (1818-83)
• Léon Walras (1834-1910)
• William Stanley Jevons (1835-82)
• Carl Menger (1840-1921)
• Alfred Marshall (1842-1924)
• Francis Ysidro Edgeworth (1845-1926)
• John Bates Clark (1847-1938)
• Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923)
• Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk (1851-1914)
• Knut Wicksell (1851-1926)
• Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929)
• Irving Fisher (1867-1947)
• Arthur Cecil Pigou (1877-1959)
• John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946)
• Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950)
• Piero Sraffa (1898-1983)
• Gunnar Myrdal (1898-1987)
• Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992)
• Simon Kuznets (1901-85)
• John von Neumann (1903-57)
• Joan Robinson (1903-83)
• Jan Tinbergen (1903-94)
• John Hicks (1904-89)
• Wassily Leontief (1906-99)
• John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)
• Milton Friedman (1912-2006)
• Paul Samuelson (1915-2009)
• Franco Modigliani (1918-2003)
• James M. Buchanan (1919-2013)
• Hyman Minsky (1919-96)
• Douglass Cecil North (1920-)
• Kenneth J. Arrow (1921-)
• Barbara R. Bergmann (1927-)
• Gary Becker (1930-)
• Amartya Sen (1933-)
• Daniel Kahneman (1934-)
• Robert E. Lucas, Jr. (1937-)
• Joseph Stiglitz (1943-)
• Paul Krugman (1953-)
• Glossary