I see little difference in style and substance between  
Polly's dismissal of work which fails to disaggragate   
production, and the way in which those who depend on these  
constructions dismiss work which chapter and verse spells  
out the problems with this work -- and the alternatives to it.  
  
In other words, Roy is playing the game of begging the question  
and shifting the burden of proof.  As Polly hints, lots of  
this stuff truly is a matter of professional power play, not explanatory  
substance, not _explanatory_ power.  That's why the game is artificially  
limited to a formal game with a prior set of artificially stipulated elements.  
A formal game is more likely to give you clean cut winners and losers,  
although its interesting to see how what is in bounds of the formal game  
and what is out of bounds gets bent by the game players over time -- perhaps  
the most interesting part of the power play.  
  
You can see this sort of thing play out all over the place in the history  
of economic thought. Consider how the profession resisted Gary Becker's novel  
use of formal elements in the theory of choice -- until younger folks caught  
on to how great this game could be as a motor for manipulating formal elements in the
service of producing publications.
  
I'm not evaluating any of this work.  This is what you can see without  
engaging the merits of the substantive thinking which led folks to resist   
Becker's "tilting" of the formal playing field or the merits of the   
substantive thinking which led folks to embrace Becker's re-conceptualizaton  
of what choice theory was meant to do.  
  
I should note that I don't particularly see this formal game playing  
as necessarily a "male" thing -- although its hard not to perceive that  
young males tend to predominate at the competitive edge of research in the  
mathematical sciences.  I think Polly is right to suggest that its hard  
not to think that this fact hasn't shaped the character and institutions of  
modern economics.  
  
Greg Ransom