A honest glossary of some Economics terminology

“Agent Based Models”: flexible economic models that can replicate actual economic phenomena, and much more
“behavioral economics”: the study of the economy as if it was a human activity
“causality”: a claim many papers allude to and some even have support for
“consumption theory”: the study of what consumers would consume if they studied consumption theory
“correlation”: different from causal effect, but strongly correlated with it
“degrowth”: politically unsustainable sustainability
“development economics”: the subfield of economics which makes researchers feel rich (cf.: “finance”)
“DSGE”: complicated, oversimplified models of an economy
“econometrics”: the art of using data to advance our understanding of economics (cf: “hardcore econometrics”)
“econophysics”: beautiful explanations of social phenomena without the inconvenience of having to understand them
“equilibrium”: something we take as given because waiting for it would take infinite time
“exogenous”: used both as a synonym of “independent variable”, and to refer to that quality independent variables typically lack
“finance”: a sector that according to pretty reasonable arguments should work reliably and not make anybody very rich
“game theory”: the science of finding vaguely plausible real world occurrencies of very cool mathematical phenomena
“gender economics”: the subfield of Economics with reversed gender imbalances
“Granger causality”: the simplest way to introduce the word “causality” in your paper
“GDP”: does not mean anything, the most obvious proxy of everything
“hardcore econometrics”: the art of using data to advance our understanding of econometrics (cf: “econometrics”)
“homo oeconomicus”: something other people believe in (see also: “mainstream”)
“instrumental variable”: something you need to defend strenously if it's not worth much
“laissez-faire”: loanword from French, hence sounding far more elegant than “anarchy”
“macroeconomics”: the only real economics
“mainstream”: colleagues who never cite my papers
“microeconomics”: the only economics which is real
“model”: a description of how the world should be in order for economists to understand it
“money”: a good that has no other use
“natural disaster”: a terrible thing, if you are not an applied economist (see also: “instrumental variable”)
“resilient”: unexpectedly surviving our inability to protect it
“returns to scale”: typically positive, unless you're talking to economics undergraduate students
“shareholder”: ultimate responsible of bad thing a firm does, with the (possible) exception of bad things it does to its shareholders
“stakeholder”: someone who has interest in something but has no rights, power, and typically merits over it (cf.: shareholder).
“statistical significance”: something that published papers eventually end up reaching
“utility”: a measure of what people want, in case there are people out there who know what they want