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A honest glossary of some Economics terminology

“Agent Based Models*”“: flexible economic models that can replicate real economic phenomena, and much more * “behavioral economics”: the study of the economy as if it was a human activity * “correlation”: different from causal effect, but strongly correlated with it * “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 fine and not make people 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 * “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”: a term that sounds 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 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