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Oh, here's another one probably to stay away from, especially just at the 
peak of the holidays, but what the heck. 
 
I fully agree that dominant groups fund research that supports their goals, 
that many economists kowtow to this and go along with it, in some cases in 
a cowardly and shameful way as Fred Lee points out, that heterodoxy is 
being and has been suppressed, that many economists who view themselves as 
simply pure scientists are in various ways simply deluding themselves, and 
that for better or worse the RAND Corp. played a very important role in the 
development of modern economics in the 1950s. 
 
However, be all that as it may, it strikes me that this is a very 
complicated business.  Thus, one of the most important economic ideas that 
received huge stimulus from RAND was game theory.  Does game theory 
necessarily support the capitalist system or the US against the Soviet 
Union?  Certainly its developers at RAND were more interested in its 
applications to actual war, nuclear showdowns and whatnot, than to 
economics, which was a strictly secondary matter.  The most famous game 
theory ideas coming out of RAND were the Nash equilibrium and the 
prisoner's dilemma.  Well, guess what?  The prisoner's dilemma shows very 
pointedly that Nash equilibria are not necessarily Pareto optimal, indeed 
are frequently not so. In what way did this development of game theory 
support some kind of ideological Cold War agenda related to the support of 
capitalism against socialism? 
 
Barkley Rosser 
 
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