Category talk:Economists

Don't you think that the names should be categorised by SURNAME, not FIRST NAME? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 21:19, 11 Jun 2004 (UTC)

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Why are there no entries after T? Wicksell and Young are categorised as economists but do not appear!

Subcategories

The number of economists is too much to lump them all into the "Economists" category. A lot have been classified by nationality, but a lot haven't. Is the goal to put them all into a nationality category? What about Daron Acemoglu, for example—is he a Turkish economist or an American economist? Furthermore, I can see Category:American economists needing to be broken into subcategories itself. It might make more sense to classify them by specialty, but that will involve a lot more judgment calls. Any thoughts? I am willing to do the work of sorting out these entries, but wonder if anyone has any thoughts first. Afelton 14:36, September 10, 2005 (UTC)

I have created Category:Classical economists as a start, but in doing this I noticed that many people (e.g. David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill were only listed as "British" or "English" economists respectively - meaning that they did not appear on Category:Economists (I have now added them to the category). This (putting someone in a subcategory but not the main category) often happens and isn't helpful. May I suggest (on the subject of overcrowding) that someone creates a system that has a Table of Contents by letter (like in List of political parties) so that it is easier to navigate. Tamino 07:49, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

badly needed revision

I think more important than an economists nationality is their area of contribution and philosophical alignment with perhaps contending but widely accepted schools of thought.

Here are some suggestions for categories: Keynesians, Anti-Keynesians, Architects of the Capital Asset Pricing Model, Behavioral Economists, International Trade Specialists, Evolutionary Economists, "Theoretical" Economists -- developers of game theory, for instance.

Sounds good, although I'm sure there will be arguments about who belongs in what category! That's fine, though, and I think much more useful information than nationality. Afelton 19:33, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

I agree. National categories can stay but "area" categories would certainly be useful (see my post above in Subcategories). Tamino 07:51, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Types of subcategories

I agree with the comments above, as long as being in one subcategory doesn't preclude being in the larger category too. That is, if Knut Wicksell is listed as a 'Swedish economist', he will be hard to find unless he is listed as an 'Economist' too.

The other thing is that it would be helpful to distinguish different TYPES of subcategories. The list above includes 'Keynesians' (i.e. classification by schools of thought) and 'International trade specialists' (i.e. classification by area of research). This makes me wonder: is there any way, in Wikipedia, to display two different blocks of subcategories separately? For example, could we list all the subcategories related to nationality separately from all the subcategories related to school of thought, and those separately from all the subcategories related to areas of research? --Rinconsoleao (talk) 11:45, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Proposed subcategory: 'Economists by area of research'

(Please expand this list!)

• Microeconomists
• Game theorists
• Business theorists
• Labor economists
• Demographic economists
• Health economists
• Public economists
• Environmental economists
• Financial economists
• Macroeconomists
• Monetary economists
• International economists

• Trade economists
• International finance economists

• Development economists
• Growth economists
• Econometricians

• Time series econometricians
• Microeconometricians

In order to avoid making lists too deep, or too mutually exclusive, I am proposing to treat most fields as areas of research in their own right, instead of treating them as subcategories of other categories. --Rinconsoleao (talk) 12:08, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Proposed subcategory: 'Economists by school of thought'

(Please expand this list!)

• Classical economists
• Neoclassical economists

• New classical macroeconomists
• Supply-side economists

• Keynesians

• New Keynesian macroeconomists

• Monetarists
• Austrian School economists
• Feminist economists
• Marxist economists
• Heterodox economists

Unsigned categories listed above are my proposals. Please sign if you propose extra categories. --Rinconsoleao (talk) 11:49, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

To answer my own question above, I see that economists of different nationalities have all been listed in the subcategory 'Economists by nationality', with subsubcategories 'American economists', 'Eritrean economists', etc.

So we could create the subcategory 'Economists by area of research', and the subcategory 'Economists by school of thought'. We could then move 'Health economists' making it a subsubcategory of 'Economists by area of research', for example. In this case it would probably not be wise to treat 'Health economists' as a subset of 'Microeconomists', because categories would probably start getting too deep.

Perhaps some moves might be controversial (I would consider 'Feminist economics' a school of thought rather than an area of research, for example). And whether 'Institutional economists' refers to a school or an area is unclear to me.--Rinconsoleao (talk) 12:02, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Question about subcategories

For Wikipedia experts: If we include 'Game theorists' as a subcategory of 'Economists by area of research', would it still be possible to list them as a subcategory of 'Mathematicians', etc.? --Rinconsoleao (talk) 12:11, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes. Though I'm no WP expertAdamSmithee (talk) 13:35, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Subcategories should all be listed on the first page!

Does anyone know how to do that? --Rinconsoleao 18:55, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

Can't be done with current software; there was recent discussion about changing this. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 18:22, 17 July 2008 (UTC)