Speaking of Economics: How to Get in the Conversation

by Klamer; Arjo

• ISBN13: 9780415395113
• ISBN10: 0415395119
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2007-04-18
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Making sense of economists and their world in a persuasive and entertaining style, Arjo Klamer, the author of a number of influential books including Conversation with Economists and The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric , shows that economics is as much about how people interact as it is about the models, the mathematics, the econometrics, the theories and the ideas that come from the enormous aggregate of economics literature. Knowing and understanding economics requires both bookwork and mingling with other economists. Viewing the subject as a collection of conversations, Klamer examines fundamental disagreements over the nature and purpose of the discipline, addressing how it is that a discipline that so permeates daily life is at once ?soft? and scientific, powerful and ignored, noble and disdained and in a reader-friendly style ? without eschewing academic methodology demonstrates economics to be a living, breathing discipline rooted in the real world. Whether you are astudent, academician, journalist, practicing economist or interested outsider, Speaking of Economics will get you interested in a conversation about economics.

Author Biography

Arjo Klamer is Professor of Cultural Economics at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and clean of the Academia Vitae.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	p. xi
Exordium: getting into the conversation	p. xii
Acknowledgments	p. xviii
The strangeness of the discipline	p. 1
Economics is a conversation or, better, a bunch of conversations	p. 15
What it takes to be an academic dog, or the culture of the academic conversation	p. 37
It's the attention, stupid!	p. 51
A good scientific conversation, or contribution thereto, is truthful and meaningful and serves certain interests	p. 66
The art of economic persuasion: about rhetoric and all that	p. 91
Why disagreements among economists persist, why economists need to brace themselves for differences within their simultaneous conversations and their conversations over time, and why they may benefit from knowing about classicism, modernism, and postmodernism	p. 126
How and why everyday conversations differ from academic ones and how and why academic conversations clash with political ones	p. 154
Peroratio: why the science of economics is not all that strange	p. 176
Notes	p. 184
Bibliography	p. 187
Index	p. 191
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