2011必威体育精装版(英文)南洋理工大学NTU国际经济思想及方法(InternationalEconomy)教程7共10.ppt

LECTURE 7: SCHUMPETER Reading: EH, 13, 22 1 What is ‘Austrian’ economics? Search, alertness, surprise: market processes, not states. Always changing. Price signals are therefore always wrong, although the best signals we have. Entrepreneurship The minimal State Rejection of equilibrium, general equilibrium, comparative statics Microeconomics, not macroeconomic: atomic, individual choice Perfect competition not inevitable benchmark Abstract and universal: historical, political and sociological elements cease to be part of (mainstream) economics Methodological individualism (not body of people) Psychological and subjectivist (eg opportunity cost): satisfaction by definition is all in the mind and each individual is a closed book to every other Human shortcomings: uncertainty, asymmetric information, error, heuristics. Purposive, but not rational maximisation. We start from here: cost cannot influence value (rejection of Marxian labour theory; questions ‘supply’ in ‘supply and demand’). All choice is forward-looking.   2 The Marginalist Revolurion ‘Happily, there is nothing in the laws of Value which remains for the present or any future writer to clear up; the theory of the subject is complete.’ J.S. Mill, 1848   ‘It is not that pearls fetch a high price because men have dived for them; but, on the contrary, men dive for them because they fetch a high price.’ R. Whately, 1832   ‘The only hope of attaining a true system of Economics is to fling aside, once and for ever, the mazy and preposterous assumptions of the Ricardian School. Our English economists have been living in a fool’s paradise.’ W.S. Jevons, 1871     3 The ‘Austrian’ School Carl Menger (1840-1921)     Eugen von Böhm Bawerk Friedrich von Wieser (1851-1914)