ABSTRACT
John Stuart Mill wrote about economics while a bureaucrat in the East India Company for thirty-six years. Francis Edgeworth, the British economist who dreamed up the indifference and contract curves, taught logic and wrote about economics as well as ethics. In the United States, academic economics came to dominate economics organizations and to define the nature of economists. Like medical doctors, economists have their own institutions that sustain the profession. Their equivalent of the American Medical Association is the American Economic Association, which confers legitimacy on economists. The economics profession is controlled by elite academics, but they make up only a small percentage of the total number of economists. The reason is that most liberal arts economics majors are actually business majors in disguise. Undergraduate students have no intention of becoming economists; they are planning to go into business, with banking, finance, and general management the most popular fields.
