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Home or Household Management: Oikos Nomos. Now known as economics. In Ancient Greece it was the male who managed his estate, allocating resources, deciding who should work and how much, what to produce, what to consume, sell, buy, and save. In the modern communist state it was the commissar that made thes allocative decisions. In North Whatcom County, it is Aran's wife Kirsi in whom resides this exhaustive authoritiy. |
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Michael Rothschild, in his book "Bionomics", said that "Economics was new because it had not been needed before. In the past, philosophers had not concerned themselves with the mundane problems of the world of work... There were no baffling agricultural conundrums to occupy the minds of the great philosophers." (page 31). Rothschild forgets, perhaps, where the word "economics" comes from: Aristotle's oikos nomos, for "home management", to which Aristotle devoted much attention - some quoted in the link above. "Economics" is an unfortunate root. It equivocates what we might now consider macroeconomics with home management, with disastrous consequences. Instructor Paul Heyne (RIP, whose text I use for my 202 Econ classes) recommends a better word for the science of eschange, which is what most of economics is about: the word "catallactics." According to Heyne, the first suggestion that economics be called catallactics (viz. the science of exchange) was made by Richard Whately in a lecture at Oxford University in 1831. The lectures were published as INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON POLITICAL ECONOMY which was reprinted by Augustus Kelley in 1966. I have seen catallactics referenced in many places since, including (if memory serves) Rohlf's Survey of Economics. The science of exchange is a more apt wording for the study we now consider economics, even though such esteemed journals as The Economist still describe it as "the science of resource allocation." Nevertheless. Economics is what we're stuck with, and that's what I do. On these pages I hope to post any and all papers that I have, for what they're worth. Unfortunately, my selection is presently limited to mostly old, undergrad stuff that somehow escaped the rubbish bin. Things written this Millenium: The Epimenides Research Project Article in Journal of Metals - Economics of the PGMs What follows are some papers from Paul Heyne's class, "History of Economics". Rent vs. Ownership - Adam Smith's Low Regard for Landlords Making Sense of Deconstructionism
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