Maux de l'économie,mots des économistes

Abstract

Economic Troubles, Economists' Words. Economic methodology has greatly separated discourse (hypotheses, theory, body of thought) and action (essentially represented by applications or descriptive monographs). In this study, with the greatest care associated with original attempts, we try to give a synthetic representation over a long period of time of the evolution of economic literature by using classic methods of data analysis. No matter what type of results are obtained, this approach remains based on the hypothesis that each literary production can be taken as a simple statistical object. The scope of this study covers work published in French on work economy from 1960 to 1980 and reveals three tendencies: (1) an decrease in accordance with the real subjects etudied (job segmentation and Increasing unemployment): (2) a profound desire to better assure the link between analysis of economic policy and a body of thought: and (3) a certain divergence according to dissatisfaction or failures encountered in studles by authors of the two preceding categories.