Economics

Kirzner defines economics as the reconciliation of conflicting ends given the existence of inescapable scarcity (1960)

Israel M. Kirzner

Found in: The Economic Point of View (1976)

Fraser has classified definitions of economics into Type A definitions and Type B definitions. Type A definitions consider economics as investigating a particular department of affairs, while Type B definitions see it as concerned with a particular aspect of affairs in general. The specific department singled out by Type A definitions has usually been wealth or material welfare. The aspect referred to in Type B definitions is the constraint that social phenomena uniformly reveal in the necessity to reconcile numerous conflicting ends under the shadow of an inescapable scarcity of means.... [In recent decades there has been a] trend away from the association of economics with specific “ends” or a specific department of human affairs. In this development the work of [Lionel] Robbins has been consistently pursued to what appears to the writer to be the most adequate solution of the problem.... [T]he contributions of several eminent economists, including Mises and Knight... [called the praxeological outlook]... has a significance that, in the writer’s opinion, has not been sufficiently recognized because it has not yet been brought into historical perspective.