Economics

Abstract

I am not an economist in any way, shape, or form. This is why I could not muster enough influence or traction to recruit or seduce a real, qualified, honest-to-goodness economist to collaborate with one chapter in this volume. However, I felt that this volume would not be complete without a chapter in this discipline. Consequently, I had to make do, in complete humility and admitted ignorance, with the help of Karen Viars, with whatever I could find by cross-indexing paradigms with economics. Then I tried to make sense of whatever information I gathered through summaries that I reproduced here with complete bibliographic acknowledgments. Whether all these summaries should be within quotes because they are essentially downloaded with few cosmetic changes is a decision that I made after discussing with two colleagues who are versed in the ethics of citing published research. The reader should understand that perhaps the whole chapter should be within quotes.