Philosophy of Economics consists of inquiries concerning rational choice, the appraisal of economic outcomes, institutions and processes, and

the ontology of economic phenomena and the possibilities of acquiring knowledge of them. Economics is concerned with aspects of the production, exchange, distribution, and consumption of commodities and can be split up into micro and macro economics. Economics is rooted in history. Socrates, Aristotle addressed economical problems and people realized the significance of using taxes and the economy. Laws were discovered to govern the complexities of economics. Contemporary economics is extremely diverse and has many schools and many branches. Few economists are satisfied with the attempts that have been made to unify microeconomics and macroeconomics as economics is not one homogenous enterprise. Econometrics is a third main branch of economics Economics closely resembles the natural sciences but faces the problem of illegitimacy of severe abstraction and idealization and overgeneralization like in the ceteris paribus clause. It isnt a science as it tells the causes but does not provide the reasons for problems. Before the 1930s, economists were willing to use causal language explicitly and literally, and there was a search for larger theoretical structures that unify and guide research within particular research traditions. Proponents included Friedman, Kuhn, and Lakatos. There are two important recent realist programs in economic methodology. The first, developed mainly by Uskali Mki, is devoted to exploring the varieties of realism implicit in the methodological statements and theoretical enterprises of economists. The second, which is espoused by Tony Lawson and his co-workers, at Cambridge, which states that one can trace many of the inadequacies of mainstream economics to an insufficient concern with ontology. Throughout its history, economics has been the subject of sociological as well as methodological scrutiny there have been substantial efforts to apply structuralist views of scientific theories to economics Nowadays the standard intellectual tool or form is a model which signals a methodological shift in economics. In the past generation, experimental work in economics has expanded rapidly. It depicts agents as to some extent rational, meaning the agent does not prefer any feasible alternative to what he or she chooses. However, data from multistage ultimatum games do not seem to agree. A great deal of controversy surrounds the theory of rationality, and there have been many formal investigations into weakened or amended theories of rationality. The theory of game theory states that when outcomes depend on what several agents do, one agent's best choice may depend on what other agents choose Economics is relevant to policy because it provides information concerning the consequences of policy. One central question of moral philosophy has been to determine what things are intrinsically good for human beings and the prevailing view among economists has shifted from hedonism to welfare and economists now make welfare evaluations of economic processes, institutions, outcomes, and policies without making interpersonal comparisons. Arthur Tan 5C21 Loh Shi Xun 5C13

Zhai Rui 5C22 Samson Lee 5C41 Tan Jun Wei 5C41