It is now an American discipline!
When I studied economics in the late Fifties economics was essentially an English discipline. It is no more! There are not many students now to study economics or do PhDs!It is now more an American discipline. In India economics still has some glamour but things are changing very fast here too. Economics doesn’t give immmediate jobs! In my time it was the British universities, more so the Cambridge University that dominated the discipline.All the bright brains were there. Keynes, his colleagues(list is long) were very around him. There were fierce arguments, about economic theories propounded by Keynes. Economic theory as such was undergoing change since the time of Adam Smith,the first propounder of economics,as a self-driven,wealth creating process. He of course took it from the French Physiocrats. Now in Keynes time it was all theory of equilibrium that explained the balance of economic forces. Prices, demand, supply, fiscal deficit, rate of employment, growth etc. Then Keynes introduced the famous line:”in the long-run we would all be dead”. So he introduced short-term,practical, interventionist ecnomic theory. Amartya Sen is a descendent of this theory only, in spite his taking the theory forward. Sen would be remembered for his contribution to the construction of the Human Development Index. However, since Sen there have been new revolutionary theories of economics that had gone on to win Nobel Prizes. and thus new rcognitions.One is Paul Ormerod who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1993. Read More →