[Posted on behalf of Warren Samuels.]
 

Neither Professor Gunning nor Professors Sent, Medaille and Nuwer are
wrong.  They are conceptualizing "the" economy differently in a way but
essentially much, but not entirely, the same way. 

Esther-Mirjam Sent believes that actual economies, e.g., markets, are
not given by nature; rather that beliefs arguably false, fictional
and/or selectively (and either consciously or inadvertently) applied
help economic agents get the kind of markets/economies they want in a
process of competition in which the object is to control markets by
controlling  policy by controlling government.  Such a market or economy
will have a history or historical form or structure depending on the
power structrure and ideological belief system, etc., that is operative.
Such a process is indeed cumulative and evolutionary, with results
generated by power structure and belief system and their interactions,
including overdetermination, some of which is deliberative and some is
nondeliberative.  Such a real-world model can be elaborated upon in
detail; suffice it for my purposes that the foregoing means that it is
not demand and supply (more or less as taught in mny, perhaps most
Principles of Economics courses) as such that governs the allocation of
resources, the distributions of income, wealth and opportunity, as
taught in micro and macro courses, but the institutions which determine
whose interest will count, or be deemed to count in the economy.  The
results of any period depend on the starting-points in place and
exercised at and after the beginning period, which results in their
becoming the starting-points for the next period.  In this model, ideas
and power count.

Professor Gunning has in mind pretty much the same economy but instead
of markets being given, as he seems to believe, he feels--and here is
where his and Professor Sent's visions converge--that the market economy
can be hindered by adopting the wrong ideas and the wrong structure of
decision making (power).  The correct ones to him are those "we"
associate with a business- or capitalist-dominated and controlling
system and government, a judgment with which it seems she disagrees, but
in effect tells Professor Gunning what his economic regime actually
amounts to, while he is endeavoring to convince her, and the rest of us,
that, sure, that is what you need to believe and pursue if the
hierarchically-open, middle-class system is to help us produce goods and
a good life. 

To both of them, therefore, ideas, beliefs that there are forces at
work, in part keeping other forces from working, that produce effects.
It is in this sense that Professor Gunning believes that erroneous
beliefs about the economy will pervert its results; but that is
precisely what Professor Sent believes.  As she believes that
wrongly-held ideas are capable of misapprehending or destroying the
economy, so too does he.  At times they envision the same ideas and at
times they project different ideas.  What is in effect common to both of
them is the need for a strategically placed "class" who needs, or says
they need, a larger slice of the pie, through, e.g., a tax cut for some
and not for others.  In this country this class has been the owners and
controllers of firms (after Berle and Means)--"private" capitalists; in
the former Soviet Union, the class was comprised of state capitalists.
The irony of part of this, and of the rhetoric of elections here, is
that our history, e.g., in Massachusetts Bay Colony, commenced in a
conflict between religious fundamentalists and traders, and that since
then, with variations in the "family values" and the domains of the
powerful, the conflict has continued.

There is, of course, more to what is going on between these folks, but
that is a decent start.

Warren Samuels