AN EXAMINATION OF PREVAILING ECONOMIC THOUGHT AS A NEGLECTION OF ETHICS AND HISTORICAL ANALYSIS

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2014-12

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Abstract

This work is essentially an intellectual history that examines how we have changed our academic approach to economics, weighed against a historical narrative of how we adopted the central banking system we now have to demonstrate that the absence of traditional historical narratives that characteristically examine human motives renders an immense ignorance of how our economies and governing systems actually function. Exploring the subject through different eras of Western history illustrates varying arrangements of governments sometimes exploiting money interests for their benefits, and in more modern times money interest exploiting the power of government for theirs, but regardless of the particulars of how it was being done or by whom, a strong historical trend is evident which should support the claim that it is a vitally important field of study. The new scientific economists and their political science counterparts that currently dominate this realm of academia, however, shifted their attention away from the historical tradition of event-based narratives to explain social phenomena and the workings of man in terms that mimic scientific law. In the wake of this movement, the history of economics has become beholden to the application of mathematics and statistical methods to mountains of economic data to extract simple relationships. This work counters that trend by examining the origins of economics from its Aristotelian teachings of natural law that influenced scholastics, up through the modern era’s turn towards science that displaced the historical tradition of event-based narratives, to show that the turn towards science coincided with vested interests promoting new scientific approaches to economics with the intent of engineering desired outcomes. Once these objectives were met, their rhetoric increasingly became the standard that economics was measured by.

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Keywords

Economic history, Economics, Ethics, Federal reserve, Austria

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