Talk:Economics/Draft

I have re-thought some of this article and tidied it up generally and I am now content to submit it for approval. - Nick Gardner 08:27, 5 February 2008 (CST)

On second thoughts there are a number of omissions that - though not of much interest to laymen - should be remedied for the sake of students of economics. Some of them can be dealt with at length in the proposed article on the philosophy of economics, but I think they should get brief references in this article so I plan to deal with them on the Tutorials subpage. I have started on economics as a science and I think there should also be something on normative and positive economics. - Nick Gardner 08:13, 7 February 2008 (CST)

rewriting the introductory material

I don't feel competent as a non-economist to do it myself, but I think that all of the introductory material could probably be rewritten (slightly) in order to put it all into a single paragraph -- or maybe two, I suppose. As it is, it looks to me to be a lot of single statements -- they *are* connected, however, so why shouldn't they be in a somewhat more literary-type organization? Hayford Peirce 17:35, 7 February 2008 (CST)

Yes, I was thinking along those lines. I suppose I should do it:-) Martin Baldwin-Edwards 20:40, 7 February 2008 (CST)

Thank you Hayford and Martin. Somehow the paragraph had "just growed" and your comment made me realise that it needed pruning. I hope it is OK now? - Nick Gardner 23:41, 7 February 2008 (CST)

Article format section

I think the article format section can be completely removed. The explanations of what the subpages contain are redundant - it's completely self-explanatory that the related articles subpage contains links to related articles and so on. It's also not something used anywhere else on the site. --Tom Morris 15:16, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

My principal reason for writing that section was to draw attention to the practice of confining the use of mathematics and graphs to a tutorials subpage - instead of the Wikipedia and previous CZ practice of including them in the main article. That was a controversial innovation when I introduced it but it was agreed with Martin Baldwin-Edwards when he was an economics editor. As far as I am aware, it is not general practice among other CZ workgroups. A second reason was to draw attention to the presence on the related articles subpage of an index of the topics dealt with in all of the economics articles - also a practice not found elsewhere.

However, I do not see how we can resolve our difference: I think the section is useful to the reader, and you do not - and neither of us has any evidence to support his case. If you feel so strongly as to delete the section, I should regret it but I should not attempt to put it back - I have (what I hope are) better things to do (!??). I leave it to you. Nick Gardner 08:23, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

Innovative Economic Policies for Climate Change Mitigation

Under this heading, a number of economic approaches to address environmental issues are being discussed here. I think these merit a closer look and incorporation into the system of economics articles, but I do not know what the best place for this may be. --Daniel Mietchen 22:46, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Daniel: I have great difficulty with the problem of balancing the uncertain costs of climate change against the estimated cost of measures to combat it, and I am profoundly sceptical of some of the subjective judgements that have been offered by environmentalists on the matter. I see this as a highly controversial issue on which Citizendium must take care not to present an unbalanced view - and I cannot, at present envisage an acceptable way of handling it. Consequently I do not feel able to take the initiative in the closer look that you propose, although I should be willing to try to evaluate contributions on the matter, acting in my role as an economics editor. Nick Gardner 06:51, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, Nick. We will take it from there. --Daniel Mietchen 08:03, 30 October 2009 (UTC)