Estática Comparativa y El Paradigma De La Economía

Comparative statics and the paradigm of economics
Introduction
Suppose we are in a conversation about social changes that have taken en place in the past generation. We might discuss. For example, the substantial increase in of participation of women in the competitive labor market especially in nontraditional occupations such as engineering, law, and medicine, the increasing prominence of the¨two earner¨ family, the increase at the age of first marriage, the rise of ¨women’s liberation¨ and the like. Suppose now that someone says, ¨let me give you an economic explanation of these events ¨what do you expect to hear? What is meant by the phrase economic explanation¨ and what would distinguish it from, say, a sociological or political explanation. For that matter, what do we mean by theterm ¨explanation¨?
A list of facts, for example, is not an explanation. Compilations of changes in the weather as seasons pass, or changes in various stock market indices, are not explanations of those events. The stylized data presented in the preceding paragraph are not an explanation of anything; they are only a collection of economic (and sociological) facts, which we typically call ¨data¨.The data may be interesting, but they are not ¨explanations¨. The term ¨explanation¨ means that there is some more general proposition than the observed data for which these facts are special cases. We interpret or understand these facts by applying some general laws or rules by which these events are supposedly guided. For example, physicists ¨explain¨ the motion of ordinary objects on the basisNewton’s classical laws of mechanics. An explanation of the previous socioeconomic data would mean an interpretation of these events in terms of a framework of systematic human behavior, not merely a documentation that these events happened to occur at a particular time. Moreover, we would want to apply that same framework to different sets of facts, allowing the investigator to interpret theseother data sets using the same guiding principles. The development of the framework and the specific models employed by economists to explain social phenomena is the subject of this book.
Students who have come this far in economics will undoubtedly have encountered the standard textbook definition of economics that goes something like, ¨Economics is the science that studies human behavior as arelationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses¨. This is indeed the substantive content of economics in terms of the class of phenomena generally studied. To many economists (including the author), however, the most striking aspect of economics is not the subject matter itself, but rather the conceptual framework within which the previously mentioned phenomena are analyzed.After all, sociologists and political scientists are also interested in how scarce resources are allocated and how the decisions of individuals are related to that process. What economists have in common with each other is a methodology, or paradigm, in which all problems are analyzed. In fact, what most economists would classify as noneconomic problems are precisely those problems that are incapableof being analyzed with what has come to be called the neoclassical on marginalist paradigm.
The history of science includes many paradigms or schools of thought. The problematic explanation for planetary motion, in which the earth was placed at the center of the coordinate system (perhaps for theological reasons), was replaced by the Copernican paradigm which moved the origin to the sun. Whenthis was done, the equations of planetary motion were so vastly simplified that the older school was soon replaced though the problematic parading is essentially maintained in problems of navigation. The Newtonian paradigm is essentially maintained in problems of navigation. The Newtonian paradigm is classical mechanics served admirably well in physics and still does in fact, in most everyday...