- •ВВЕДЕНИЕ
- •PART I
- •Unit 1
- •Text A. About Myself
- •Text B. What is Economics?
- •Grammar
- •Unit 2.
- •Text A. My Friend Tatiana
- •Text В. Definitions of Economics
- •Grammar
- •Unit 3.
- •Text A. My Family
- •Text B. Three Types of Economists
- •Unit 4.
- •Text A. My University
- •Text B. Economics at the University of Cambridge
- •Grammar
- •Unit 5.
- •Text A. The Russian Federation
- •Text В. Economy of Russia
- •Grammar
- •Unit 6.
- •Text A. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
- •Text B. Economy of the United Kingdom
- •Unit 7.
- •Text A. American Values
- •Text B. American Economy
- •Grammar
- •Unit 8.
- •Text A. Australia
- •Text В. Economy of Australia
- •Grammar
- •Unit 9.
- •Text A. What Jobs Do Economics Graduates Get in the United States?
- •Text B. Looking for a Job
- •Grammar
- •PART II
- •Unit 1. ECONOMICS
- •Text A. Modern Economic Thought
- •Text B. The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics
- •Unit 2. ECONOMIC SYSTEMS
- •Text A. Capitalism
- •Text B. Planned Economies
- •Unit 3. FUNDAMENTAL LAWS OF ECONOMICS
- •Text A. Law of Demand
- •Text B. Law of Supply
- •Unit 4. ECONOMIC PROBLEMS
- •Text A. Inflation
- •Text В. Unemployment in the USA
- •Unit 5. MARKET
- •Text A. Competition
- •Text В. Natural Monopoly
- •Unit 6. MACROECONOMIC PARAMETERS
- •Text A. Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
- •Text В. Business Cycles
- •Unit 7. MANAGEMENT
- •Text A. Management
- •Text B. Key Traits of Successful Leaders
- •Unit 8. MARKETING
- •Text A. Marketing
- •Text B. Brand Names
- •Unit 9. INTERNATIONAL ECONOMY
- •Text A. The World Bank
- •Text B. The International Monetary Fund
- •PART III
- •Lives of Great Economists
- •Biography of Adam Smith (1723 — 1790)
- •Biography of David Ricardo (1772 — 1823)
- •Biography of J. S. Mill (1806 — 1873)
- •Biography of Karl Marx (1818 — 1883)
- •Biography of Thornstein Veblen (1857 — 1929)
- •Biography of Alfred Marshall (1842 — 1924)
- •Biography of Carl Menger (1840 — 1921)
- •Biography of John Maynard Keynes (1883 — 1946)
- •Autobiography of Ragnar Frisch (1895 — 1973)
- •How I Became an Economist by Paul A. Samuelson
- •Autobiography of Leonid Vitaliyevich Kantorovich (1912 — 1986)
- •Biography of Milton Friedman (1912 — ...)
- •Autobiography of George J. Stigler
- •Autobiography of John F. Nash, Jr. (1928 — ...)
- •Works of Great Economists
- •An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
- •Principles of Economics
- •General Theory of Employment, Interest and Mone
rather than the exception. His singular analytical contribution was what came to be known as the "ceremonial / instrumental dichotomy". Veblen saw that every culture is materially-based and dependent on tools and skills to support the "life process". The "ceremonial" was related to the past and supported the tribal legends; "instrumental" was oriented toward the technological imperative to judge value by the ability to control future consequences. The "Veblenian dichotomy" was a specialized variant of the "instrumental theory of value" of John Dewey, with whom Veblen was to make contact briefly at the University of Chicago.
The most important works by Veblen include Theory of Leisure Class, Theory of Business Enterprise, his monograph Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution, and the essay entitled Why Economics is not an Evolutionary Science which have both been influential in shaping the research agenda for following generations of social scientists.
Biography of Alfred Marshall (1842 — 1924)
Alfred Marshall was born in London. He became one of the most influential economists of his time. His book Principles of Political Economy (1890) brought together the theories of supply and demand, of marginal utility and of the costs of production into a coherent whole. It became the dominant economic Textbook in England for a long period.
Marshall grew up in the London suburb of Clapham and was educated at the Merchant Taylor's School and St. John's College, Cambridge, where he demonstrated an aptitude in mathematics. Although he wanted to become a clergyman, his success at Cambridge University led him to take an academic career. He became a professor in 1868 specializing in political economy. He desired to improve the mathematical crisis of economics and transform it into a more scientific profession. In the 1870's, he wrote a small number of articles on international trade and the problems of protectionism. In 1879, many of these works were compiled together into a work entitled The Pure Theory of Foreign Trade: The Pure
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Theory of Domestic Values. In the same year, together with his wife Mary Paley Marshall he published The Economics of Industry.
Alfred had been Mary Paley's professor of political economy at Cambridge and the two were married in 1877, forcing Alfred to leave, his position at Cambridge in order to comply with celibacy rules at the university. He became a principal at University College, Bristol, again lecturing on political economy. He perfected his Economics of Industry and published it more widely in England as an economic curriculum. Marshall achieved a measure of fame from this work, and upon the death of William Jevons in 1881, Marshall became the leading British economist of the scientific school of his time.
Marshall began work on his seminal work, the Principles of Economics in 1881. His plan for the work gradually extended to a twovolume compilation on the whole of economic thought; the first volume was published in 1890 to worldwide acclaim that established him as one of the leading economists of his time. The second volume, which was to address foreign trade, money, trade fluctuations, taxation, and collectivism, was never published at all. In Principles of Economics Marshall emphasized that the price and output of a good are determined by both supply and demand: the two curves are like scissor blades that intersect at equilibrium. Modern economists trying to understand why the price of a good changes still start by looking for factors that may have shifted demand or supply. They owe this approach to Marshall.
The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 prompted Marshall to revise his examinations of the international economy and in 1919 he published Industry and Trade at the age of 77. This work was more empirical than the largely theoretical Principles, and for that reason it failed to attract as much acclaim from theoretical economists. In 1923, he published Money, Credit, and Commerce, a broad amalgam of previous economic ideas, published and unpublished, stretching back a half-century.
From 1890 to 1924 he was the respected father of the economic profession and to most economists for the half-century after his death, the
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venerable grandfather. He had shied away from controversy during his life in a way that previous leaders of the profession had not, although his evenhandedness curried great respect and even reverence from fellow economists, and his home at Balliol Croft had no shortage of distinguished guests. His students at Cambridge became leading figures in economics, including John Maynard Keynes and Arthur Cecil Pigou. His most important legacy was creating a respected, academic, scientifically-founded profession for economists in the future that set the tone of the field for the remainder of the twentieth century. Marshall died at his home in Cambridge, England, on July 13, 1924 at the age of 81. He is buried in the Ascension Parish Burial Ground in Cambridge.
Biography of Carl Menger (1840 — 1921)
Carl Menger was the founder of the Austrian School of economics. Menger was born in Poland. He was the son of a wealthy family of minor nobility, his father was a lawyer. After attending gymnasium he studied law at the Universities of Prague and Vienna and later received a doctorate in law from the University of Krakow. In the 1860's Menger left school and worked as a journalist reporting and analyzing market news, first at the
Lemberger Zeitung in Lvov and later at the Wiener Zeitung in Vienna. During the course of his newspaper work he noticed a discrepancy
between what the classical economics (he was taught in school) said about price determination and what real world market participants believed. In 1867 Menger began a study of political economy which culminated in 1871 with the publication of his Principles of Economics ("Grundsatze der Volkswirtschaftslehre"), thus becoming the father of the Austrian School of economic thought. At the time Principles was largely ignored, although they were later credited as a contribution to the Neoclassical Revolution.
In 1872 Menger was enrolled into the law faculty at the University of Vienna and spent the next several years teaching finance and political economy both in seminars and lectures to a growing number of students. In
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1873 he received the university's chair of economic theory at the very young age of 33.
In 1876 Menger began tutoring Archduke Rudolf von Habsburg, the Crown Prince of Austria in political economy and statistics. For two years Menger accompanied the Prince in his travels, first through Europe and then later through the British Isles. He is also thought to have assisted the Crown Prince in the composition of a pamphlet, published anonymously in 1878, which was highly critical of the higher Austrian aristocracy. His association with the Prince would last until Rudolfs suicide in 1889.
In 1878 the Emperor (Rudolfs father) appointed him to the Chair of Political Economy in Vienna. The title of Hofrat was conferred on him and was appointed to the Austrian Herrenhaus in 1900.
After he received his professorship he set about refining and defending the positions he took and methods he utilized in Principles, the result of which was the 1883 publication of Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences with Special Reference to Economics. The book caused a firestorm of debate; members of the Historical School of economics began to derisively call Menger and his students the "Austrian School" to emphasize their departure from mainstream economic thought in Germany. In 1884 Menger responded with the pamphlet The Errors of Historicism in German Economics and launched the infamous
Methodenstreit, or methodological debate, between the Historical School and the Austrian School. During this time Menger began to attract likeminded disciples who would go on to make their own mark on the field of economics.
In the late 1880's Menger was appointed to head a commission to reform the Austrian monetary system. Over the course of the next decade he authored a plethora of articles which would revolutionize monetary theory including The Theory of Capital (1888) and Money (1892). Largely due to his pessimism about the state of German scholarship Menger resigned his professorship in 1903 to concentrate on study. He died in 1921.
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