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Economics Essay

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Definition of Topic: Economics is the study of supply and demand. It defines the ways that human beings allocate resources and how resources are distributed amongst a market. It allows you to see trends in current market places and predict what may happen in the future. Many different subjects were once regarded as a part of economics. Political science and even sociology were once considered part of the field. These subjects still play a major role in understanding economics but are also completely separate disciplines today. History: Since ancient times, humans have contemplated basic economic problems. Many great minds have tried to master the subject. Aristotle and Plato were probably the first to document such studies. Both …show more content…

For Marx, capitalism's fatal contradiction was between improving technological efficiency and the lack of purchasing power to buy what was produced in ever larger quantities. John Maynard Keynes was a student of Alfred Marshall and an exponent of neoclassical economics until the 1930s. The Great Depression bewildered economists and politicians alike. The economists continued to hold, against mounting evidence to the contrary, that time and nature would restore prosperity if government refrained from manipulating the economy. Unfortunately, approved remedies simply did not work. In the U.S., Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1932 landslide presidential victory over Herbert Hoover attested to the political bankruptcy of laissez-faire policies. New explanations and fresh policies were urgently required; this was precisely what Keynes supplied. In his enduring work The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, the central message translates into two powerful propositions. Existing explanations of unemployment he declared to be nonsense: Neither high prices nor high wages could explain persistent depression and mass unemployment. Instead, he proposed an alternative explanation of these phenomena focused on what he termed aggregate demand—that is, the total

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