What Economists Do: A Journey through the History of Economic Thought

About the Book

Economists are sometimes praised and often chastised for what happens to the nation and the world economies. But what exactly do economists do to earn either praise or scorn? Author Attiat F. Ott with Sheila Vegari explores the answer to that question in What Economists Do: A Journey through the History of Economic Thought.

Ott and Vegari outline the discipline of economics through the views and ideas of nine political economists of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and the twentieth centuries. The chronologies of ideas involve a journey through the history of economic thought from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations to Nobel Laureate James Buchanan’s The Calculus of Consent.

This study reviews some of the arguments offered about economics as a science, presents the concepts of political economy, and discusses the principles of the macro economy as put forth by John Maynard Keynes in The General Theory. It also covers the idea of the public economy advanced by the classical economists and augmented by the work of Paul Samuelson, Richard Musgrave, Gordon Tullock and James Buchanan. It examines the role of the economist as a teacher, a political economist, and as an adviser to policy makers.

What Economists Do: A Journey through the History of Economic Thought provides an intriguing picture of how economics has come of age through a chronology of ideas and principles that shape the world’s economies.

About the Author

Attiat F. Ott earned a PhD in Economics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. She is a research professor of economics at Clark University and president of the Institute for Economic Policy Studies, Worcester, Massachusetts. She is the author and/ coauthor of more than 12 books and two hundred articles and monographs

Sheila Vegari earned a PhD in Economics at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts. She is a research associate at the Institute for Economic Policy Studies, Worcester Massachusetts and and an instructor at LaSalle University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She published articles in several economic journals.