Branko milanovic biography of albert

Serbian-American. PhD in economics. Professor of economics at CUNY, LSE and IBEI (Barcelona)

1. Why does economics matter?

This is a huge and difficult question. Perhaps I can give two different answers. I would like to start with the one that I would have used when I was young and studied Marxist economics. Economics matters because it enables you to look at the grand political and economic changes in history and to explain them using economic factors. In other words, it is, if I can say so, a branch of historical materialism. Decisions driven by economic factors shape societies and make them change.

A neoclassical view of economics would be more pragmatic. It would be to argue that economics matters - and to use Alfred Marshall’s definition there - because it deals with our ordinary life and its objective is to improve that ordinary life, to make our incomes higher, to allow us to have more free time, and to make poverty disappear so that Biography of albert einstein.