PHILOSOPHY OF ECONOMICS EDUCATION

1.0: INTRODUCTION:

1.1: What Is Economics?

Though its ancient etymology defines it as “the science of wealth” its meaning has expanded over time, and it is now a social science that studies the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services.

The term economics is derived from economic science and the word economic is shortened from economical or derived from the French word économique or directly from the Latin word oeconomicus "of domestic economy". This in turn comes from the Ancient Greek οἰκονομικός (oikonomikos), "practiced in the management of a household or family" and therefore "frugal, thrifty", which in turn comes from οἰκονομία (oikonomia) "household management" which in turn comes from οἶκος (oikos "house") and νόμος (nomos, "custom" or "law"). (Harper, Douglas, 2007.)

The discipline was renamed in the late 19th century, primarily due to Alfred Marshall, from "political economy" to "economics" as a shorter term for "economic science". At that time, it became more open to rigorous thinking and made increased use of mathematics, which helped support efforts to have it accepted as a science and as a separate discipline outside of political science and other social sciences. Rhona. (2010).

Economics is a study of man in the ordinary business of life. It enquires how he gets his income and how he uses it. Thus, it is on the one side, the study of wealth and on the other and more important side, a part of the study of man. (Marshall, Alfred (1890). Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics analyzes basic elements in the economy, including individual agents and markets, their interactions, and the outcomes of interactions. Individual agents may include, for example, households, firms, buyers, and sellers. Macroeconomics analyzes the entire economy in terms of  aggregated production, consumption, savings, and investment, likewise  the  issues affecting it, including unemployment of resources (labour, capital, and land), inflation, economic growth, and the public policies that address these issues (monetary, fiscal, and other policies).

Economic analysis can be applied throughout society, in business, finance, health care, and government. Economic analysis is sometimes also applied to such diverse subjects as crime, education social institutions, war, science, and the environment. (www.wikipedia.com)

1.2: What is Philosophy?

Philosophy is defined as the use of reason in understanding such things as the nature of the real world and existence, the use and limits of knowledge, and the principles of moral judgment (https://dictionary.cambridge.org)

1.3: Economics and Philosophy.

The disciplines of economics and philosophy each possess their own special analytical methods, whose combination is powerful and fruitful. Economics and Philosophy aims to promote their mutual enrichment by publishing articles and book reviews in all areas linking these subjects. Today,  philosophy and economics, heavily overlap in basically three subject which can be regarded respectively as branches of action theory, ethics (or normative social and political philosophy), and philosophy of science. Economic theories of rationality, welfare, and social choice defend substantive philosophical theses often informed by relevant philosophical literature and of evident interest to those interested in action theory, philosophical psychology, and social and political philosophy. (www.wikipedia.com).

First of all, there are questions related to philosophy of science – it is economics of science, how does it explain things, why is it that it is not as successful as other sciences, and indeed general questions about whether a science of human beings, of society is possible in the same way as we can have a science of physics or chemistry.

Second area of overlap is normative, ethical. Economists are certainly concerned about how to make people’s lives better. Economics is clearly very important to how well people live, and there is a real question about whether economics as a science can be divorced from moral questions concerning human wellbeing, what are the proper social policies to be followed.

The third area of overlap is much more recent than the others and that concerns the theory of rationality, because contemporary economics is really built around a theory of rationality and the model, or the picture of human beings that economists rely on is a picture of human beings as rational, where rationality is understood in a formal, or, rather, narrow way. Hausman, (2018).

The question usually addressed in any subfield of philosophy (the philosophy of X) is "what is X?" A philosophical approach to the question "what is economics?" is less likely to produce an answer than it is to produce a survey of the definitional and territorial difficulties and controversies. (www.wikipedia.com).

Traditionally, philosophy of economics really goes back to the beginning of modern economics, what can be found in Adam Smith’s reflections on a nature of what he is doing. The first really systematic reflection on the nature of economics was in the 1830s in England, and economist, who is now not perfectly known by the name of Nassau Senior and then a very great economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote on the scientific methodology of economics and also a bit on the relationship between economics and ethics, the issues about rationality do not arise until modern times. Hausman, (2018).

In the early modern period, those who reflected on the sources of a country’s wealth recognized that the annual harvest, the quantities of goods manufactured, and the products of mines and fisheries depend on facts about nature, individual labor and enterprise, tools and what we would call “capital goods”, and state and social regulations. Trade also seemed advantageous, at least if the terms were good enough. It took no conceptual leap to recognize that manufacturing and farming could be improved and that some taxes and tariffs might be less harmful to productive activities than others. But to formulate the idea that there is such a thing as “the economy” with regularities that can be investigated requires a bold further step.(Hausman, (2018).

Lionel Robbins defined economics as “the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses” (An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, 1932, p. 15). Robbins holds the view that economics is not concerned with production, exchange, distribution, or consumption as such. It is instead concerned with an aspect of all human action. Here economics goes beyond its traditional domain to other issues like elections.

1.4: Macroecomonics,  Microecomonics and Econometrics:

Microeconomics examines how entities, forming a market structure, interact within a market to create a market system. These entities include private and public players with various classifications, typically operating under scarcity of tradable units and light government regulation. The item traded may be a tangible product such as apples or a service such as repair services, legal counsel, or entertainment. (Wikipedia.com)

In theory, in a free market the aggregates (sum of) of quantity demanded by buyers and quantity supplied by sellers may reach economic equilibrium over time in reaction to price changes; in practice, various issues may prevent equilibrium, and any equilibrium reached may not necessarily be morally equitable. For example, if the supply of healthcare services is limited by external factors, the equilibrium price may be unaffordable for many who desire it but cannot pay for it.

Macroeconomics examines the economy as a whole to explain broad aggregates and their interactions "top down", that is, using a simplified form of general-equilibrium theory.(Blaug (2017), p. 345 :) Such aggregates include national income and output, the unemployment rate, and price inflation and subaggregates like total consumption and investment spending and their components. It also studies effects of monetary policyand fiscal policy.

Microeconomics focuses on relations among individuals (with firms and households frequently counting as honorary individuals and little said about the idiosyncrasies of the demand of particular individuals). Macroeconomics grapples with the relations among economic aggregates, such as relations between the money supply and the rate of interest or the rate of growth, focusing especially on problems concerning the business cycle and the influence of monetary and fiscal policy on economic outcomes.

Econometrics is the application of statistical methods to economic data in order to give empirical content to economic relationships.( Pesaran (1987) . More precisely, it is "the quantitative analysis of actual economic phenomena based on the concurrent development of theory and observation, related by appropriate methods of inference.  Samuelson, Koopmans,  Stone (1954).

If should take a  look at contemporary economics, the casual factors are basic claims about rationality, claims that consumers want more goods rather than fewer goods, claims that those who are in charge of businesses want larger net returns and suppose to have smaller net returns, and we put all those things together deductively. This is a very mathematical science, and economist hopes to get a little bit of control over understanding what actually goes on in the world, because economists are simplifying so much and leaving out so many relevant casual factors.

Schools of macroeconomics include Keynesians (and “new-Keyesians”), monetarists, “new classical economics” (rational expectations theory — Begg 1982, Carter and Maddock 1984, Hoover 1988, Minford and Peel 1983), and “real business cycle” theories (Kydland and Prescott 1991, 1994; Sent 1998). Mainstream economics are also devoted to specific questions concerning growth, finance, employment, agriculture, housing, natural resources, international trade, and so forth. Within orthodox economics, there are also many different approaches, such as agency theory (Jensen and Meckling 1976, Fama 1980), the Chicago school (Becker 1976), or public choice theory (Brennan and Buchanan 1985, Buchanan 1975). 

Different schools of economics continue to raise a wide variety of epistemological and ontological issues concerning philosophy of economic. The Ricardian vice has been an recurrent issue, this refers to abstract model building and mathematical formulas with unrealistic assumptions. In simpler terms, the Ricardian vice is the tendency for economists to make and test theories that aren't troubled by the complexities of reality, resulting in theories that are mathematically beautiful but largely useless for practical applications. (www.investopedia.com).

Joseph A. Schumpeter coined this term “Ricardian vice” in his book History of Economic Analysis when he criticized the habit assigned to Ricardo to represent the economy by a set of simplified assumptions and to use tautologies to develop practical economic solutions. In Schumpeter’s own words :

His (Ricardo’s) interest was in the clear-cut result of direct, practical significance…, He then piled one simplifying assumption upon another until, …he set up simple one-way relations so that, in the end, the desire results emerged almost as tautologies. For example (if)… profits ‘depend upon’ the price of wheat. And under his implicit assumptions.., this is not only true, but undeniably, in fact trivially, so. Profits could not possibly depend upon anything else, since everything else is ‘given’, that is frozen. It is an excellent theory that can never be refuted and lacks nothing save sense. The habit of applying results of this character to the solution of practical problems we shall call the Ricardian Vice. (Schumpeter, 1954: 472-73)

Schumpeter rejected the kind of economic thought that mainly favours deductive methods of inquiry – based on mathematical reasoning because the  habit  known as the Ricardian Vice generates analytical unrealistic results that are irrelevant to solve the real-world economic problems as was evident in the 2008 global financial crisis.

2.0: ONTOLOGY, EPISTEMOLOGY AND AXIOLOGY OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF ECONOMICS EDUCATION:

2.1: EDUCATIONAL IDEALISM IN ECONOMICS EDUCATION:

Idealism is the group of metaphysical philosophies that assert that reality, or reality as humans can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, Idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing. In contrast to Materialism, Idealism asserts the primacy of consciousness as the origin and prerequisite of material phenomena. According to this view, consciousness exists before and is the pre-condition of material existence. Consciousness creates and determines the material and not vice versa. Idealist believes consciousness and mind to be the origin of the material world and aims to explain the existing world according to these principles.

Economics has continued to raise questions that concern the legitimacy of severe abstraction and idealization used in economics education. Mainstream economic models often stipulate that everyone is perfectly rational and has perfect information or that commodities are infinitely divisible. Such claims has been considered  in some quarters exaggerations, and are clearly false. Other schools of economics may not employ idealizations that are this extreme, but there is no way to do economics if one is not willing to simplify drastically and abstract from many complications.

Idealism theories are mainly divided into two groups. Subjective idealism and Objective idealism;

Subjective idealism takes as its starting point the given fact of human consciousness seeing the existing world as a combination of sensation. Objective idealism posits the existence of an objective consciousness which exists before and, in some sense, independently of human ones. In a sociological sense, idealism emphasizes how human ideas—especially beliefs and values—shape society.( Macionis, John J. (2012). Sociology 14th Edition. Boston: Pearson. p. 88. ISBN 978-0-205-11671-3.) As an ontological doctrine, idealism goes further, asserting that all entities are composed of mind or spirit. (Daniel Sommer Robinson, "Idealism", Encyclopædia Britannica) Idealism thus rejects physicalist and dualist theories that fail to ascribe priority to the mind. (Wikipedia.com)

Economic theories are built on representations of economic experiences. However, all representations must pass the test of meeting the otherness of experience. Indeed, reality is a system of relations that imply existence. In other words, reality is revealed in existence as fact, as a phenomenon. Thus, the real is not what we think of it, it is not a creation of the human mind (Ibri, 1992).

Under an ontological point of view, realistic theories are built by constitutive achievements through a process of inference and interpretation (Peirce, 1975). In this attempt, it can be said that the phenomenology of economic relations is a pillar for an ontology of Economics in the framework of realistic theories about the behaviour of those economic relations as dynamic and evaluative objects.

The real set of economic relations are not strictly causal and governed by a system of laws because the idea of a real-world governed by laws is a mere assumption, it’s not real. As a matter of fact, the ontological indeterminism of economic relations corresponds to a worldview where the economic facts could present deviations from the so called economic laws, or even where the world of economic experiences has elements of chance that are responsible for such deviations

 In other words, the presence of chance and uncertainty makes room for discontinuities between the past and the future that add certain degree of indeterminacy to the evolution of economic relations. Thus, as the ontological indeterminism makes room for chance as a possibility not regular through time, the principle of chance has relevant implications for a realistic theoretical approach to the study of economic decisions and actions through the flow of time (Ibri, 2000).

As a result, the acceptance of a certain degree of indeterminacy in economic phenomena reinforces the importance of formulating economic theories that consider the changing features of their objects of research in their historical and evolutionary circumstances. In this way, realism in Economics should enhance a dialogue between theories and the complex economic phenomena that they intend to explain. As a result, the principles of economic theories should therefore be compatible with the properties inherent in the dynamic nature of the economic objects, as the only possible way to illuminate central features of the real-world. Madi, (2017)

2.2: EDUCATIONAL REALISM IN ECONOMICS EDUCATION:

Realists believe that reality exists independent of the human mind. The ultimate reality is the world of physical objects. The focus is on the body/objects. Truth is objective-what can be observed. Aristotle, a student of Plato who broke with his mentor's idealist philosophy, is called the father of both Realism and the scientific method. In this metaphysical view, the aim is to understand objective reality through "the diligent and unsparing scrutiny of all observable data." Aristotle believed that to understand an object, its ultimate form had to be understood, which does not change. Aristotle also was the first to teach logic as a formal discipline in order to be able to reason about physical events and aspects. The exercise of rational thought is viewed as the ultimate purpose for humankind. (Cohen, 1999).

Realism has probably had the greatest impact in education, because it is the foundation of scientific reasoning. Realist educators encourage students to draw their observations and conclusions from the world around them, rather than confining themselves to an analysis of their own ideas. In this changing environment of real-world markets where economic events are happening on a large scale globally, I believe economists should learn how to develop realistic economic theories.

2.3: EDUCATIONAL MONOISM/SPIRITUALISM IN ECONOMICS EDUCATION:

Spiritualism is a metaphysical belief that the world is made up of at least two fundamental substances, matter and spirit. This very broad metaphysical distinction is further developed into many and various forms by the inclusion of details about what spiritual entities exist such as a soul, the afterlife, spirits of the dead, deities and mediums; as well as details about the nature of the relationship between spirit and matter. It may also refer to the philosophy, doctrine, or religion pertaining to a spiritual aspect of existence. (www.wikipedia.com)

Spiritualistic traditions appear deeply rooted in shamanism and perhaps are one of the oldest forms of religion. Mediumship is a modern form of shamanism and such ideas are very much like those developed by Edward Burnett Tylor in his theory of animism,  in which there are other parallel worlds to our own, though invisible to us and not accessible to us in our state. In every era of human history, humanity has faced a unique challenge. Today, world all over, the major challenge is the reconciliation between the material and non-material dimensions of our human existence. In the past the challenge was to reconcile science and religion.

Founders of economic thinking have not begun as economists, in the way we understand the profession today. Many of them were philosophers, moralists, ethicists, priests, etc. Reardon, (2009) hence, It is only spiritual economics can truly embody the being of what humanity is all about through a continuous transformation process in economics education.

2.4: EDUCATIONAL PLURALISM IN ECONOMICS EDUCATION:

The pluralism in economics movement is a campaign to change the teaching and research in economics towards more openness in its approaches, topics and standpoints it considers. The goal of the movement is to "reinvigorate the discipline and bring economics back into the service of society" Some have argued that economics had greater scientific pluralism in the past compared to the monist approach that is prevalent today. Pluralism encourages the inclusion of a wide variety of neoclassical and heterodoxeconomic theories—including classical, Post-Keynesian, institutional, ecological, evolutionary, feminist, Marxist, and Austrian economics, stating that "each tradition of thought adds something unique and valuable to economic scholarship" (https://en.wikipedia.org)

The question remains, however, how to develop activities that engage students in ways that promote deep approaches to learning and generate desired outcomes. Fink (2003) provides one avenue for developing courses in which the experience of learning matters as much as associated activities in moving students beyond note memorization, identifying six categories associated with ‘significant learning’. They are;

i.                    Foundational knowledge: Provides ‘the basic understanding that is necessary for other kinds of learning’.

ii.                  Learning how to learn: Learning about the learning process in a way that enables students to become better students, inquire about a subject and construct knowledge, and become ‘self-directing learners’.

iii.                Application: Involves ‘using foundational knowledge’ and encompasses the development of different skills and thinking (critical, creative, and practical), as well as the ability to manage complex projects.

iv.               Integration: Involves making connections between ideas, people, and realms of life.

v.                 Human dimension: Refers to the process of learning about oneself and others, to ‘inform students about the human significance of what they are learning’.

vi.               Caring: Involves the ‘development of new feelings, interests and values’.

2.5: EDUCATIONAL ABSOLUTISM (MERCANTILISM) IN ECONOMICS EDUCATION:

Mercantilism is considered the Economic Side of Absolutism. Mercantilism is an economic philosophy that emphasizes competition between nations for wealth, which was measured in terms of who had the most gold and silver.

A mercantilist economy stresses national self-sufficiency and the preservation of national wealth through a favorable balance of trade. Mercantilism is a type of command economy, strictly regulating the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. (Rothbard, 2017).

As the economic aspect of state absolutism, mercantilism was of necessity a system of state-building, of big government, of heavy royal expenditure, of high taxes, of (especially after the late 17th century) inflation and deficit finance, of war, imperialism, and the aggrandizing of the nation-state.

The focus in examining mercantilist thinkers and writers should not be the fallacies of their alleged economic "theories." Theory was the last consideration in their minds. They were, as Schumpeter called them, "consultant administrators and pamphleteers" — to which should be added lobbyists. Their "theories" were any propaganda arguments, however faulty or contradictory, that could win them a slice of boodle from the state apparatus.

2.6: EDUCATIONAL FORMALISM IN ECONOMICS EDUCATION:

The Growth Model of John von Neumann In the immediate post-War years, Mark Blaug (1999, 2003) identified the emergence of a new paradigm in economics, the so-called “formalist paradigm”, which marked the arrival of the pre-eminence of (mathematical) form over (theoretical) content, and which is mostly characterised by the crucial importance economists give to a specific (non-constructive) kind of demonstration of existence of equilibrium. This revolution took shape in the 1950s and 1960s around the works of Arrow, Debreu, Patinkin, Solow, Dorfmann, Samuelson and Koopmans.

The term “formalism” in education indicates use of symbols and unspecified mathematical techniques to express an idea. By formalism, one is able to understand a particular philosophy of mathematics which reduces it to a formal language, and is opposed to intuitionism and logics on the question of the foundations of mathematics.

 In 1997 the editor of Governing magazine published an op-ed attacking the economics profession for denying the obvious fact that globalisation was having devastating effects on the economy (Ehrenhalt, 1997).  As an example of just how bad economists are, he quoted an unnamed `prominent economist' ‘Prof. Paul Krugman’, who had written that’s there are important ideas in economics that are crystal clear if you can stand algebra, and very difficult to grasp if you can't'. This, according to the op-ed writer, was an `insult', a `charge of illiteracy'; he went on to assert that algebra could not be essential to economic understanding, because if it were this would delegitimize the opinions of people who had not studied algebra when young and were now too old to retool.

Many, indeed probably most, of the non-economists who attack the field’s formalism do so not because that formalism makes the field irrelevant, but on the contrary because economists insist that their equations actually do say something about the real world.

2.7: EDUCATIONAL RATIONALISM IN ECONOMICS EDUCATION:

Economic rationalism is an Australian term often used in the discussion of macroeconomic policy, applicable to the economic policy of many governments around the world, in particular during the 1980s and 1990s.

Economic rationalists tend to favour neoliberal policies: deregulation, a free market economy, privatisation of state-owned industries, lower direct taxation and higher indirect taxation, and a reduction of the size of the welfare state. However, the term "economic rationalism" is commonly used in criticism of free-market economic policies as amoral or asocial. In this context, it may be summarised as "the view that commercial activity, represents a sphere of activity in which moral considerations, beyond the rule of business probity dictated by enlightened self-interest, have no role to play". (Quiggin,1997).

In support of economic rationalism, some economists have denied that such criticisms are accurate and claim that the term refers only to rational policy formulation based on sound economic analysis, and it does not preclude government intervention aimed at correcting market failure, income redistribution etc.

Recently across the global, government economic policies have begun to give more attention to the ‘internal’ processes of teaching, learning, research and management, in terms of the size of the education budget, the number and types of institutions etc. Economic rationalism has installed a free market economic agenda at the heart of public education policy, with deep consequences for both the academic and the democratic project.

2.8: EDUCATIONAL NATURALISM IN ECONOMICS EDUCATION:

Philosophically, naturalism is the "idea or belief that only natural ‘as opposed to supernatural or spiritual’ laws and forces operate in the world.  Naturalists assert that natural laws are the rules that govern the structure and behavior of the natural universe, that the changing universe at every stage is a product of these laws.

With the exception of pantheists—who believe that Nature is identical with divinity while not recognizing a distinct personal anthropomorphic god—theists challenge the idea that nature contains all of reality. In the 20th century, Willard Van Orman Quine, George Santayana, and other philosophers argued that the success of naturalism in science meant that scientific methods should also be used in philosophy.

2.9: EDUCATIONAL SCIENTISM IN ECONOMICS EDUCATION:

Hayek defined "scientism" or the "scientistic prejudice" as "slavish” imitation of the method and language of Science" when applied to the social sciences, history, management, etc. Scientism represents "a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed, and as such is "not an unprejudiced but a very prejudiced approach which, before it has considered its subject, claims to know what is the most appropriate way of investigating it.

It no doubt the In the field of social science the man who suggests self-criticism and internal systematic doubt of what we are doing often invokes the scorn and wrath of his fellows who feel threatened in smug niches of narrow expertness.

2.10: EDUCATIONAL RELATIVISM IN ECONOMICS EDUCATION:

Relativism, roughly put, is the view that truth and falsity, right and wrong, standards of reasoning, and procedures of justification are products of differing conventions and frameworks of assessment and that their authority is confined to the context giving rise to them. More precisely, “relativism” covers views which maintain that—at a high level of abstraction—at least some class of things have the properties they have (e.g., beautiful, morally good, epistemically justified) not simpliciter, but only relative to a given framework of assessment (e.g., local cultural norms, individual standards), and correspondingly, that the truth of claims attributing these properties holds only once the relevant framework of assessment is specified or supplied. Relativists characteristically insist, furthermore, that if something is only relatively so, then there can be no framework-independent vantage point from which the matter of whether the thing in question is so can be established. (Hausman, 2018).

2.11: EDUCATIONAL MATERIALISM IN ECONOMICS EDUCATION:

Materialism is the importance a person attaches to acquiring and consuming material goods. The use of the term materialistic to describe a person's personality or a society tends to have a negative or critical connotation. Also called acquisitiveness, it is often associated with a value system which regards social status as being determined by affluence as well as the belief that possessions can provide happiness. Materialism can be considered a pragmatic form of enlightened self-interest based on a prudent understanding of education. It is a personal attitude which attaches importance to acquiring and consuming certain good and services.

2.12: EDUCATIONAL EXISTENTIALISM IN ECONOMICS EDUCATION:

The nature of reality for Existentialists is subjective, and lies within the individual. The physical world has no inherent meaning outside of human existence. Individual choice and individual standards rather than external standards are central. Existence comes before any definition of what we are. In education, the subject matter of existentialist classrooms should be a matter of personal choice. Teachers view the individual as an entity within a social context in which the learner must confront others' views to clarify his or her own. Real answers come from within an individual, not from outside authority. Examining life through authentic thinking involves students in genuine learning experiences. Existentialists are opposed to thinking about students as objects to be measured, tracked, or standardized. Such educators want the educational experience to focus on creating opportunities for self-direction and self actualization. (Cohen, 1999).

2.13: EDUCATIONAL PERENNIALISM IN ECONOMICS EDUCATION:

Educational perennialism is a normative educational philosophy. Perennialists believe that one should teach the things that are of everlasting pertinence to all people everywhere, and that the emphasis should be on principles, not facts. Since people are human, one should teach first about humans, rather than machines or techniques and liberal rather than vocational topics. (www.wikipedia.com).

Here, the aim of education is to ensure that students acquire understandings about the great ideas of Western civilization. The focus is to teach ideas that are everlasting, to seek enduring truths which are constant, not changing, as the natural and human worlds at their most essential level, do not change. (Cohen, 1999).

2.14: EDUCATIONAL MODERNISM IN ECONOMICS EDUCATION:

Modernism is a philosophical movement that, along with cultural trends and changes, arose from wide-scale and far-reaching transformations in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Economics developed as a product of Enlightenment, emerging as a distinct field with the publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations in 1776.

The term modernism denotes not so much a fully fleshed-out ideology as a zeitgeist, a "spirit of the age." It developed at the end of the 19th century, became dominant with World War I, and went into eclipse in the 1970s, and it affected not only the arts but also philosophy and the social sciences. In part, modernism represented a reaction against Romanticism and the values of the Victorian era. (Wells, 2010). Modernism was a reaction to mass culture and totalitarianism government support and afored the masses to more educational products like novels. In general, capitalists made reading culture widespread by the mass production of knowledge products.

2.15: EDUCATIONAL POS MODERNISM IN ECONOMICS EDUCATION:

Postmodern economists Ruccio and Amariglio, authors of Postmodern Moments in Modern Economics, explain, “The Postmodern condition opens up a very different research agenda for economic scientists should they choose to disown (what many regard as a necessary fiction) the unified self and move, instead to a fiction supposedly more in tune with contemporary reality, the de-centered self. Postmodernists tend not to use traditional language associated with economics—wages, pensions, interest rates, inflation, Social Security, retirement, etc. Instead, they use obscure words and phrases such as fragmentation, differentiation, chronology, pastiche, anti-foundationalism, and pluralism. Noebel, (2006).

2.16: EDUCATIONAL CONSTRUCTIVISM IN ECONOMICS EDUCATION:

Education  is  collegiums  of  rapidly  changing  technology, moral  learning  and  child  development  for  creating equitable,  just  and  democratic  societies. (Yadav, Renu. (2016).

Constructivism is a theory of learning based on the idea that knowledge is constructed by the knower based on mental activity. Learners are considered to be active organisms seeking meaning. Constructions of meaning may initially bear little relationship to reality (as in the naive theories of children), but will become increasing more complex, differentiated and realistic as time goes on.

According to Bednar, et al (1991) the learner is building an internal representation of knowledge, a personal interpretation of experience. This representation is constantly open to change, its structure and linkages forming the foundation to which other knowledge structures are appended. Learning is an active process in which meaning is developed on the basis of experience. Conceptual growth comes from the sharing of multiple perspectives and simultaneous changing of our internal representations in response to those perspectives as well as through cumulative experience.

3.0: REFERENCES:

Hodgson, Geoffrey (2006) On the Problem of Formalism in Economics, VOPROSY ECONOMIKI

Free, Rhona C., ed. (2010). 21st Century Economics: A Reference Handbook. Volume  1. SAGE Publications. p. 8. ISBN 978-1-4129-6142-4.)

Daniel Hausman, Herbert A. Simon and Hilldale Professor of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin: An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, 1932, p. 15).

David Noebel, Summit Press, 2006. Compliments of John Stonestreet, David Noebel, and the Christian Worldview Ministry at Summit Ministries.)

David F. Ruccio and Jack Amariglio, Postmodern Moments in Modern Economics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 299.

Econometrics: The New Palgrave, p. 1 [pp. 1–34].Abstract Archived 18 May 2012 at the Wayback Machine. (2008 revision by J. Geweke, J. Horowitz, and H. P. Pesaran).

Harper, Douglas (2007). "Online Etymology Dictionary – Economy"

Hausman, Daniel M., "Philosophy of Economics", The Stanford Encyclopedia of  Philosophy (Fall 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/economics/>.

Hayek's Economica essays on scientism were collected in his 1952 Counter- Revolution of Science and reprinted in volume 13 of the Collected Works.)

Helmut Schoeck and James W. Wiggins (1960). https://mises.org/library/6-economics-modernism

Hodgson, Geoffrey (2006) On the Problem of Formalism in Economics, VOPROSY ECONOMIKI

Iannaccone, Laurence R. (September 1998). "Introduction to the Economics of  Religion". Journal of Economic Literature. 36 (3): 1465–1495.)

Krugman, Paul; Wells, Robin (2012). Economics (3rd ed.) Worth Publishers. p. 2. ISBN 978-1464128738.)

LeoNora M. Cohen, (1999). Philosophical Perspectives in Education retrieved from https://oregonstate.edu/instruct/ed416/PP2.html

Marshall, Alfred (1890). Principles of Economics. Macmillan and Company. pp. 1–2.

Mercantilism as the Economic Side of Absolutism 12/26/2017 Murray N. Rothbard)

[This article is excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith.] (https://mises.org/library/mercantilism-economic-side-absolutism)

Lawson, Tony. (2002). Mathematical Formalism in Economics: what really is the problem?.

Maria A. Madi. (2017). Realism in Economics: ontological indeterminism and methods of inquiry.

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