杂记

Preface 45

As background introduction of this textbook of economics, the author, not necessarily Samuelson, laid out several situations that are considered crucial to the significance of economics studies:

...over the past quarter-century...dozens of countries have rejected socialist and collectivist approaches... 

...(some think) prosperity would lead to a declining interest in economics... 

...ever-more-competitive market scene... 

...developing countries...need...understanding...of market economy...if they are to attain the living standards of the affluent... 

So economics here is really a science of the capitalists, based solely on the fundamental axiom of selfishness, and interested only in the functions of this form of a social structure called market economy.
I really double if this textbook is written specifically for students and scholars of developing countries, whose population size has supplied the book to an eighteenth edition.
As such this book, and a whole system of economics doctrine based on similar ideologies, basically the neo-Keynesian, can be treated as the user manual of a machine that is dynamical, capricious, but mainstream.
I will have to be aware of and remember well where the hypothesis is made though. Otherwise it will be as dangerous as assuming the help of an invisible hand when jumping off windows.

Preface 49

...young people battered down walls, overthrow established authority, and agitated for democracy and a market economy...because of discontent with their central socialist governments...

and we did exactly the same because of love and vigor towards that central socialist government.

第4页

Definitions of scarcity and efficiency quoted, as two fundamental assumptions.
In particular, efficiency is defined in margins, I.e. In terms of better and worth offs in everyone's 'economic goods', and suggests a rather 'collective' perspective of bearing the 'goods' of other people in mind, although certainly in marginal terms only and nothing of collectivism is involved.
In the book Adam Smith is identified as founder of modern microeconomics, and Keynes of macroeconomics. This is surprisingly frank, to admit dependence of mind of a researcher, and how much this stated commitment in a top-selling textbook has contributed to the eminence of Keynesian economics must be at least worth noticing.

第5页

Statistics and the scientific method. As oppsing the mathematical inductive reasoning based on certain normative axioms like that of the existence of oneself, which most philosophers adopted until rise of science.

第6页

Discrepancies between individual and aggregate behavior are contended to have been the results of interacting individuals. Why exactly does the system and it's components behave in different ways? Because some the system's properties are not determined by it's components, but by the internal forces, which is equally part of the system?

第8页

Positive economics, no ambiguous morals involved in the problem setting, I.e. Everything factual. Normative economics, in which ethical aspects projected by human onto economic goods are involved.
If economics be divided into production and distribution, then production is more related with positive economics, and positive economics focuses on production most naturally. Once distribution is involved, ethical aspects are inevitable.

第7页

Fundamental economic problems, how did the governors and people in the most prosperous ages of China dealt with them? Do they deal with the problems by themselves or are they actually just participants of historical processes? How did the Chinese understand and solve their identified economics issues?