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I want to agree with Peter's remark, with one caveat. Clearly, whatever 
orthodoxy is today, it is not your father's orthodoxy. The problem for the 
survival of OIE is not that institutions and related subjects are being 
ignored by orthodoxy but rather the reverse. Previously forbidden terrain 
is now the turf of dissertations, stuff published across the spectrum of 
orthodox journals, and Nobel awardees. In addition to economic history and 
Stiglitz et al. on information issues, the deification of Coase stands out, 
as does the Public Choice and Social Choice work of Buchanan, Olson, et al. 
The empirical work on comparative growth wouldn't exist without the 
incorporation of scores of political and social indicators. The explosion 
of interest in the problems of transition, the shift from one institutional 
regime to another in the old Eastern Bloc, may be the most compelling 
historical influence on the revaluation of different ways of thinking in 
economics. 
 
Even game theory, whatever its limitations, has been tortured into some 
degree of relevance in looking at human interactions. I have reservations 
about experimental economics, but here too there has been much more 
deflation than inflation of whatever is left of the rational economic 
person. Finally, since one could go on, in my field of development 
economics or, better, economic development, nobody talks anymore about 
savings, capital, and so on, and it is pretty much wall to wall 
institutions and institutional reform, and I don't mean just pro-market 
reform at all. I might use the umbrella term governance to cover a range of 
institutional issues. 
 
My caveat is the old distinction between agency and structure. Orthodoxists 
still try to ground most of their work on individual decisions and choices 
while institutionalists put the person in the context of culture and 
institutions, but in a manner much less deterministic than a few decades 
ago. And, no, Alice, I don't know of any accessible middle ground 
reconciling the two. 
 
When is the last time anyone who would call itself an institutionalist was 
heard to say anything of commanding interest? 
 
I opined over ten years ago that "we had won" and it was time to declare 
victory and move on, to what I was more coy about. I've never been one to 
accept the whining loser line. 
 
John "OIE" Adams 
University of Virginia 
 
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