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From:
[log in to unmask] (Lee, Frederic)
Date:
Fri Mar 31 17:18:49 2006
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To reply to Pat Gunning's comments.  First heterodox economics roughly  
defines economics as examining and explaining the social provisioning  
process.  Of course within this approach agents make decisions but how  
they make them is outside the approach used in mainstream economics:  
people make decisions/choices but they are not neoclassical  
decisions/choices.  However making decisions is just one small component  
of the social provisioning process and hence one small component of  
heterodox economics.  Secondly, by framing the discussion in terms of  
economics as a theory of choice with constraints, the exclusion of  
heterodox economics/economists from the discussion is not unexpected (if  
not undesired).  But on a HES listserve where many of the economists are  
heterodox economists such a discussion seems perhaps inappropriately  
exclusionary.  Why not have the discussion examine the historical  
transformation of the conception of the definition of economics to a  
theory of choice and how historically organizational power etc. was used  
to put the definition in place and to maintain it.  Such a discussion  
would, I believe, engage more of those on the listserve and also make a  
contribution to the history of economics.  
  
Fred Lee   
 

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