from Robert Reich
This weekend many of my students will be graduating. Some will get degrees in economics. Economics didn't exist as a separate discipline until the great Alfred Marshall published his "Principles of Economics" in 1890. Before that, economics was considered a part of "political economy," and those who studied and taught it knew that economics couldn’t be understood without an understanding of politics, and vice versa. They were correct. Markets don't exist on their own. There is no market in nature, only survival of the strongest. Markets are human institutions whose rules are developed by legislatures, agencies, and courts.
Not even "political economy" existed as a separate discipline in the eighteenth century. Adam Smith, the presumed founder of economics, called himself a "moral philosopher" because the broad discipline from which both politics and economics were born was moral philosophy, for which the central defining question was "what is a good society?" Without a grounding in morals and ethics -- without a deep understanding that social science is rooted in moral inquiry -- students are left in an ethical wilderness, as is the rest of society.