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FINANCIAL MARKET: A market that trades financial assets. Financial assets are the legal claims on the real assets in our economy and include such notable items as corporate stocks and bonds, government securities, and money. Without financial markets our economy would find it almost impossible to accumulate the funds needed for investment in big, expensive capital projects.
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                           DISMAL SCIENCE: A term for the study of economics developed during the late 18th and early 19th century when economists concluded that continued population growth would push wages and living standards to a minimal subsistence level and keep them there. It persists to the present time because economics continue to point out that actions result in opportunity cost, that nothing is free, and that eventually society has to pay the price for what it does. The notion that economics is a dismal science emerged out of the work of several late-18th and early-19th century scholars, most notably Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo.As Malthus, Ricardo, and their contemporaries pioneered the development of the economics discipline, they pondered (among many things) topics like population, the supply of labor, and worker wages. In so doing, they concluded--erroneously as it turns out--that continued population growth would push wages and living standards to a minimal subsistence level and keep them there. According to these early economists, the prospects for humanity were bleak, miserable, and well... downright dismal. Not Too DismalWhat they failed to adequately consider, however, were technology, capital investment, and limited population growth. Technological advances, by improving the quality of capital and increasing the skills of labor, made workers more productive, leading to increased wages and boosted living standards. Continued capital investment had a similar result. In addition, as living standards rose, people chose to have smaller families, which resulted in lower rates of population growth, which also led to increased wages.Dismal ScarcityAlthough the human condition is not nearly as bleak as anticipated by Malthus and Ricardo, economic dismality persists largely due to the persistent problem of scarcity. Combining unlimited wants and needs with limited resources means that everyone cannot have everything that they want. While politicians and others are fond of telling people what they can have, economists are generally in the position of telling people what they cannot have.The bottom line is that the human condition can improve and living standards can rise, but complete utopia is unlikely.
Recommended Citation:DISMAL SCIENCE, AmosWEB Encyclonomic WEB*pedia, http://www.AmosWEB.com, AmosWEB LLC, 2000-2025. [Accessed: July 13, 2025].
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ORANGE REBELOON
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Today, you are likely to spend a great deal of time at a crowded estate auction hoping to buy either a battery-powered, rechargeable vacuum cleaner or a remote controlled World War I bi-plane. Be on the lookout for infected paper cuts.
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Okun's Law posits that the unemployment rate increases by 1% for every 2% gap between real GDP and full-employment real GDP.
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"To sit back and let fate play its hand out, and never influence it, is not the way man was meant to operate." -- John Glenn, astronaut, U.S. senator
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DCE
Domestic Credit Expansion
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