Archived a lot of old talk to Talk:Political economy/archive - Enchanter - exhaustive debate regarding 'the commons' etc. which is mostly relevant to the old text.
I rewrote the first paragraph, although I realize it will be improved by others. My main concern is that it is too simplistic to equate economics with PE. There is an important and interesting relationship and the article should do full justice to it, but even if many economists use "economics" and "political economy" interchangably -- do they really? I didn't think so. -- the first paragraph needs to do more to signal diffferent usage and the context in which these different uses occur. This is what I tried to do. Slrubenstein
If you take a course (at least in the US) called "political economy" in a political science department, and a course called "political economy" in an anthropology department, the two courses will likely have NOTHING in common (except perhaps at a level so abstract as to be meaningless). I think a good article on PE would explain both why these two courses would be so different, and why they would both have the same name. Slrubenstein
- You are right, the article does need to make this clear. The term 'political economy' is used by different people to mean different things. I do think however that most often, political economy is basically another word for economics with slightly different connotations, and the article should make this clear. My evidence for this:
- The term economics was not invented until about 1870, and did not catch on until much later, andll work corresponding to modern economics done in this time would have been described as political economy.
- In the titles of many journals (eg Journal of Political Economy) and degree courses (I have a degree in "political economy" from a UK university) political economy is used as a synonym for economics.
- isn't the field of economics itself a lot broader in the uk though? seems most of this w:social capital theory comes from the UK, for instance.
- The New Palgrave dictionary of economics has a detailed discussion of the differences in usage between the two terms, concluding that the difference is minor.
- a 'dictionary of economics' is hardly going to say 'economics is bunk and you have to look at this political stuff to really understand anything'. They are not going to send students to radical non-orthodox literature, for instance.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica makes do with a two paragraph article on economics, which basically just says political economy is another word for economics.
- I think that generally political economy covers the same subject matter as economics, and should therefore be discussed in the same articles. Most of what is in the current article is from a (slightly ideosyncratic) marxist inspired analysis, and should properly belong in an article titled perhaps marxist economics or marxist political economy. This article needs a lot of work, it's hard to understand, and includes some blatant errors - I'll have a go at it sometime... Enchanter 04:46 Aug 3, 2002 (PDT)
- seems these comments refer to 24's original article, and 24 did write a fair number of articles on Marxist and Green and Libertarian theory. Did he have a bias towards any one of them? If so, why is his article on capitalism still more or less intact? Any why is it 'Marxist' to suggest economics is rigged? Greens and Libertarians both say that, and so do public choice theory types like Buchanan.
By the way, in my own opinion the bulk of the article -- all those short sections later on -- is a mess: extremely poorly written, unclear, perhaps biased, uninformative, maybe misleading. Slrubenstein
- Unfortunately still true Enchanter 04:46 Aug 3, 2002 (PDT)
- unclear whether you refer to the original article, now entirely gone, or the new one that emphasizes 'public choice theory' - since SR and 24 agreed on some points re: the commons, those are now mentioned in the article, but if anything it's now biased towards Buchanan, just as 24's article was biased towards Hawken Lovins Lovins. Perhaps 24's approach of looking for a common list of issues investigated by all the variant schools of economics was right, and it was just a writing problem? This 'safety, fairness, closure' stuff deserves some more investigation, it seems right to say that this is what people are concerned with when they open up the non-orthodox economic can of worms, but it seems wrong to say (as 24 did) that political economy just 'is' the study of these three things. Anyway, whoever wants to handle this next, PLEASE READ EVERYTHING INCLUDING THE OLD TALK AND 24'S OLD ARTICLE, just to be sure you 'get it'. No point going through this whole 'vicious cycle' again. I'm done with this!