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Date: | Tue May 1 15:04:40 2007 |
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At the HET page of the New School, Goncalo Fonseca wrote:
(http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/frisch.htm)
"The Norwegian economist Ragnar Anton Kittil Frisch was the lord of economic
nomenclature. He coined many of the words and phrases we are now familiar
with in economics, such as "macroeconomics", "econometrics" and "flow-input,
point-output", "impulse and propagation", etc. Some of his novel words did
not really catch on (e.g. "passus coefficient", "polypoly", the "pari-passu
law", etc.), but that hardly deterred him. At any rate, Frisch was in an
excellent position to be master wordsmith: he also helped create the very
fields he littered with his nomenclature."
Does it sound intriguing, I mean, the idea of littering with nomenclature? I
tend to think that macroeconomics has no reason to have such a hopeless
name: being macro does not give any distinction from being micro from an
anlaytical point of view. The prefix creates a pretension that somehow
aggregates have a separate kind of character worthy of separate treatment.
See for example how micro takes over macro and robs it of any special
character at the link below:
[1]http://ideas.repec.org/p/wpa/wuwpma/0404012.html
Mohammad Gani
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