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Through Craig Newmark I stumbled upon a list on Wikipedia of Unsolved Problems in Ecomomics. Like a lot of the material on Wikipedia, there are no citations or indication of where the material comes from, who the authors are and what qualifications do they have.

That being said, I do descry the awareness of such a list fascinating and I applaud these anonymous authors for giving it their best effort. I would love to see a survey of, say, the AEA asking members in the direction of their lists of top unsolved economics questions.

To say a question is "unsolved" implies that the question potentially has a figuring out, in the same way has a solution. The difficulty is, most of the questions on this list are so vague that they cannot possibly have a solution. As such, the list, in my opinion, is a poor inseparable.

Follows is the laundry list (as of August 12, 2008) and my comments on each: Top Unsolved Problems in Economics – According to Wikipedia

The Industrial Revolution is one of the most important times in economic history, so ideally we would like to know as much about it as possible. No event has a single cause – the Civil War was not wholly caused by slavery and World War I was not wholly caused by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. This is a question without a solution, as events have numerous causes and determining which ones were more important than others naturally involves some subjectivity.

Another question with no objective solution. People will always have differing views on this because of the subjective weight they put on vs. – even if we managed to fully understand the exact trade-off that was being made in each case.

This is not a question that peculiarly interests me, but it may others. It at least appears to be a question that has an objective answer (particularly if you remove the "How").

See piece of advice 1.

This, in my view, is a truly important question. I suspect if you polled economists on unsolved economics problems, this question, in some form, would make most of their top 10 lists.

I am not sure if I understand the problem here. What would make economics unusual than, say, physics where we can provender causal explanations (the projectile travelled 440 feet because it was launched at point from angle at velocity , etc. etc.)

I am not a finance guy, but this seems like a consistent question.

Is this really an unsolved examine? I am not sure if it is, if we management of money such as any other commodity in our conservatism and as such is prone to to the same supply and demand forces.

They look into b pursue up with "Mainstream economics claims that it is; post-Keynesian economics claims that it is not." I think there is a good interview in here, though I do not think the issue is strictly to do with endogeneity (which, strictly speaking, is a modelling assumption). If the question is properly constructed, I think this could be considered one of the key problems in economics.

This question is so broad it is unanswerable. My academic investigate is on price grouping in oligopolies and even that is so broad that I do not believe you can have a unmarried "solution".

An intriguing question, but one equivalent to item #1 in that it is so broad you cannot listen to a single answer for it. Interesting related questions are what causes the variation of income between any two individuals and what causes some countries to grow faster than others. The last question, in my view, is probably the most effective inseparable in economics, though again it seems difficult to find an objective "solution" to it. Those are my views – I would love to hear yours. Please leave your feedback at this blog post.