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Socio-Economics - An Overview, Robert Ashford

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

Socio-Economics is a multi-disciplinary, holistic approach to economics that has gained growing acceptance in legal education and that is helpful in advocating economics justice. Socio-economics approaches economic understanding much as Adam Smith did (before there were separate disciplines) with a foundation based on natural and moral philosophy. Nevertheless, it explicitly acknowledges the powerful and pervasive influence of the neoclassical paradigm on contemporary thought. Recognizing that people first adopt paradigms of thought and then perform their inductive, deductive, and empirical analyses, socio-economists seek to examine the assumptions of the neoclassical paradigm, develop a rigorous understanding of its limitations, improve upon its …