Talk:Newtonian time in economics
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[edit] Very confusing
User:N2E linked the Austrian School article to this article. I'm still trying to understand why that link was inserted, but while I'm over here I thought I'd ask "what is a continuous unit"?
I understand about discrete units. They're like atoms ... we can chop something up until we're down to the units, or elements, and then we can't chop those up any more finely. But the continuum isn't like that. So the phrase "continuous units" is an oxymoron. Why does this article refer to something that cannot exist? DavidCBryant 12:29, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
- Good questions David. Let me give both your questions a shot, and then add a third.
- 1) I linked to the Austrian School of Economics because O&R claim "This book began as an attempt to survey and restate the basic features of "Austrian" economic theory" (pp. 1) and I was surprised not to find a WP article on the book itself, and a relatively poor article on Newtonian Time. Thus, I thought the See also link might get some Austrian's over here to improve this article. Also, I recall reading somewhere that Karen Vaughn, a fairly well-known Austrian Economist was quoted in the 1990's as saying something to the effect that "Since 1985, all Austrian economics has been the economics of time and ignorance."
- 2) I agree with you that that statement is confusing. I don't think that the whole article on NT is very well written. I have a working concept of what O&R mean by the shortcomings of the concept of time that is used by the neoclassicist economists, and they call that concept NT. But I haven't read the entire book and don't want to undertake trying to fix this article. But it would be good if someone did.
- 3) On the sentence in the article: "Gerald O'Driscoll and Mario Rizzo claimed Newtonian time has little relevance for economics in their book, The Economics of Time and Ignorance. Neo-classical economics implictly embrace this framing of time and, in doing so, downplay essential facets of a dynamic economic system." I do not agree with the first half of the quote. The second sentence is okay. I think they are simply saying that neoclassic modeling, which uses a concept here called NT, is not sufficiently robust to be able to model endogenous change very well. Neolclassical econ, with it's emphasis on equilibrium at a given set of exogenous conditions, can look for a different equilibrium when the exogenous conditions change, but has no mechanism withIN their economic models to endogenously explain the change, why it happens, how far it will go, etc. They clearly believe that Austrian econ theory can help here. I have not read very much of O&R, so don't want to try to fix this until I understand more. Possibly later this term, if I have the time. N2e 04:49, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Orphan Tag
I removed the orphan tag since the article is now linked by a couple of articles. I'm not sure how many articles make up a Wikipedia orphan, so if two is not enough, feel free to add the tag back in. N2e 04:55, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Newtonian time outside of economics
I did several searches on Google scholar and, while I found 35 uses of NT in economics and business literature, there were 175 in the social sciences and humanities, and nearly 500 in physics, astronomy and planetary science.
Net: there is probably a lot more that should be said in this wikipedia article about newtonian time. It is clear that the article, as of today, is focused on just the use of the term within Economics. Can other editors help on this? N2e 04:08, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
- I agree. Economics is certainly not the first thing that should be discussed when talking about Newtonian time! Horia 14:12, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
