Скачать или смотреть Kingston Masters Political Economy Lecture 01: Methodology and the Supply Curve

This first lecture introduces my section of this subject: five lectures on Neoclassical economics, three on Post Keynesian, and two on Marxian. I start this lecture with the criticisms of Neoclassical economics by The Guardian's Economics Editor Larry Elliott, and the response of several IFS (Institute for Fiscal Studies) economists arguing that Elliott misunderstood the role of simplifying assumptions in economics. They draw an analogy between simplifying assumptions in economics and the London Tube Map, which they rightly say would be useless unless it made simplifying assumptions.

I then turn to a key "simplifying assumption" in Neoclassical economics--that the marginal cost of production rises as output rises--and show that this is empirically and logically false. So what Neoclassical economists are defending are not simplifying assumptions, but complicating assumptions needed to make a false paradigm appear to work.