Proposal: Economics
Is this site about pure economics such as theory?
How about other fields related to economics such as stock, money flow, investment trend(what kind of investment should we choose in different time, for example: when the economy is in recession, people tend to invest in gold, and why people choose to invest in gold)
One of the difficulties with economics as a stack exchange site is that economics is not a science in the same way as other sciences we typically think of. It's not taxonomic, inductive, or deductive. I foresee lots of subjectivity on this SE site (and therefore, lots of arguing) unless we constrain questions carefully.
Questions about the stock market ("Is now a good time to buy XYZ?", "What is a good P/E ratio?", etc.) seem clearly off-topic to me. But questions about how macroeconomic factors affect the stock market may be on topic, so long as they are not subject to opinion. E.g. "What factors explain the swings in global equity markets?" is a divisive question. You'll have Austrians on one side and Keynesians on the other arguing against each other.
A better question would be, "How does Austrian monetary theory explain rapid swings in US equity markets 2000-2011?" This is a question that can be answered without degenerating into an argument about whether Austrian theory is correct or now.
I believe those topics that involve single persons, like "What should I invest in?", but also topics that involve trying to earn as much money as possible should be asked in the Personal Finance and Money site.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "pure economics", and you're asking two different questions here. One asks about economic theory; the other asks about issues that would definitely be considered "applied" issues. I'll try to address them both.
Is this site about pure economics such as theory?
I think this site should definitely include theory. There is such a thing as an economic theorem (the welfare theorems and Edgeworth's limit theorem come to mind, but there are many others), and an economics.SE site would be woefully incomplete if it didn't allow discussions of such theory. Keep in mind, however, that economic theory is often very quantitative. I asked about this in another question because I feel that quantitative questions should not be excluded.
How about other fields related to economics such as stock, money flow, investment trend(what kind of investment should we choose in different time, for example: when the economy is in recession, people tend to invest in gold, and why people choose to invest in gold)
These are certainly economic issues, but questions about choosing investments and the costs/benefits to choosing them should be asked on the Personal Finance and Money site. The issue with subjective questions like this on a site like economics.SE is that a) every pundit, and therefore every person, "knows the answer" and has subjective interpretations of the data to back up their conclusion.
I think questions about why the economy is in a recession could have several types of answers. The standard explanations could be an option, or references to published papers, studies by the Federal Reserve, etc. could be another option. The latter, however, can get extremely technical and outside of a layman's understanding of economics. I think such questions and both types of answers should be welcome, but I'm worried that people will reject the latter types of answers as too advanced or too technical, even if it's more accurate.
In the second case, what sort of answer would you prefer?
