Economics: The User's Guide

The Austrian school also argues that the world is highly complex and uncertain.

Rudge: How do I define history? It’s just one fucking thing after another.’

ALAN BENNETT, THE HISTORY BOYS

economics can never be a science in the sense that physics or chemistry is

Herbert Simon, the founder of the Behaviouralist school, once estimated that only about 20 per cent of economic activities in the US are organized through the market.

But the economy should not be equated with the market.

The economy is much bigger than the market: the need to think about production and work

The standard definition of unemployment underestimates the true extent of it by excluding discouraged workers in the rich countries and the under-employed in the developing countries

The way we construct economic indicators has huge consequences for how we organize our economy, what kind of policies we implement and ultimately how we live our lives.

numbers in economics are invariably the results of attempts to measure concepts whose definitions are often extremely contentious or at least debatable.2

‘Everything factual is already a theory’: facts, even numbers, are in the end not objective