2. Economics Yesterday and Today

As we have just seen, economics is not just an open-ended study of the economy, nor is it simply a collection of ideas and tools. It is an enterprise, with its own particular history, structure and values. We have sketched some of this very briefly, but we need to consider the economics enterprise in more depth before beginning the actual study of economics. After all, it is the deeper purposes of economic analysis that give meaning to the various definitions and models we will examine, and these purposes are the product of many generations of teachers, writers and researchers, each building on or reacting to the experiences of their predecessors. What economic ideas mean cannot be separated from what they mean to those who develop and use them.