Socioeconomics

Although people have used the term socioeconomics for more than a century in many contexts, in 1997, law teachers agreed to a statement of its methodological principles, useful for addressing law-related economic issues. This appeared in the petition that established the Section on Socio-economics of the Association of American Law Schools, which more than 120 law teachers from over fifty American law schools signed.

This statement is a definition of socioeconomics and an approach to economics that suspends several critical assumptions underlying neoclassical economics. These include the assumptions that (1) people behave rationally, according to definitions of rational behavior in neoclassical economics; (2) people act only with self-interest; (3) income distribution is in accordance with marginal productivity theory under conditions of perfect competition; (4) preferences are ...