Economic Thinking

Abstract

Economics is a constantly changing discipline. This can be said about most disciplines, but it is particularly applicable to economics. At one time, around the turn of the nineteenth century, students could think of economics as being neatly contained within the sphere of commercial life. Indeed, in his long-adopted Principles of Economics textbook, eminent British economist Alfred Marshal defined economics as dealing with the “ordinary business of life.”¹ Through the middle of the twentieth century, most courses and books on the subject traditionally revolved around such topics as money, taxes and tariffs, stocks and bonds, cost structures, forms of business organization, and the operation of the market as it pertains to the production and sale of automobiles and toothpaste.