Becoming An Economist 2018-19 Lecture 01: Paradigms and Anomalies

It starts with the fact that economists disagree with each other because they follow different “paradigms” about what economics is.

I compare the state of economics today to the state of astronomy half a millenium ago, when the empirically accurate but completely wrong Ptolemaic Earth-centric model of the Universe was challenged by the initially less empirically accurate, but structurally correct Copernican Sun-centric model of the Solar System.

I then outline the at least eight different competing paradigms in economics, each of which starts from a quite legitimate question about the nature of the economy.