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Is everything good in political economy incorporated into modern graduate education in economics? With the transition of the art of political economy into the science of economics, there was a significant narrowing of graduate education curriculum. The prevailing technique in economics, a neoclassical framework focusing on formal empirics, gradually compressed artistic components of economics, including philosophical underpinnings, democratic justifiability, theoretical intuition, comparative institutional analysis, and political economy. Courses on the history of economic thought, which historically played a role in introducing graduate students to the complexities of the art of political economy, are now only offered as an elective. This paper argues, however, that there are still insights to be gleaned from studying the classics of political economy in graduate education. We highlight the tradeoff between theoretical cumulativeness and knowledge, arguing that significant insights from historical works of political economy are often absent in contemporary technical expositions of economics. We explore examples of useful knowledge in political economy that was lost in the transition away from the art of political economy. To remain an operationally valid social science, economists should reintroduce the artistic elements of political economy into the graduate training of economists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study investigated public authority regulations and the invisible hands of Adam Smith in a free market economy during the emergency a paradoxical relationship but the focus is to determine the place of public authority regulation of prices of goods during pandemic. It generated primary data by administering sets of questionnaires to selected firms and the data was analyzed using the Chi-square analysis. The two hypotheses formulated for the study was tested at a 5% level of significance. Results revealed that there were no price variations in pharmaceutical products and bakery companies' products during the first wave of covid'19 pandemic in Nigeria. The findings show that because the restriction of movement did not affect essential commodities, and international borders were open for pharmaceutical goods and other essential products. Though discovery from the skeletal interviews conducted, showed an increase in demand for bakery products but no corresponding rise in prices. This movement restriction was affected by the firm order and directives of the government as carried out by COVID-19 task force. It is suggested that government should regulate the prices of commodities during emergencies to curtail artificial inflation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]