Share
School Research Seminar

Flaws in the Economics We Teach and Learn

Almost all standard textbooks in economics overlook at least two basic flaws in the exposition of conceptual and analytic frameworks. The first of these pertains to the collection of residual externalities that exist without being internalized in market transactions. Therefore such externalities fall outside the calculus of national income accounting. For example, not all energy resource prices capture the entirety of the damages inflicted on natural ecosystems. The second flaw is the absence of sustainability as a necessary condition in the fundamental benchmark of perfect competition (PC). Sustainability, when explicitly introduced in the PC benchmark results in significant changes to conceptual premises in economics. The most significant of such changes concerns the axiomatic differentiation between "goods" and "bads”.

Seminar Room 2-2,
Level 2, Manasseh Meyer,
Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy,
National University of Singapore

Tue 14 August 2018
12:15 PM - 01:30 PM

Jesuthason Thampapillai

Jesuthason Thampapillai

Visiting Professor, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy

More about speaker

Scott Valentine

Scott Valentine

Assistant Dean (Research) and Associate Professor, LKYSPP