Thanks for the cite. But what I am searching for is a LANGUAGE.
For example, I can say with regard to macro: "Well, that is
basically a Keynesian interpretation, and this guy over here is
offering a Chicago neoclassical interpretation, and that guy over
there is putting a Minnesota rational expectations spin on it, and
back over here they've responded with neo-Keynesianism."
See?
My problem takes a number of forms. On the simplest level,
let's say we're into the lazy-man's-Polanyi version of "barter"
vs. "cash economies". There is a literature that offers a very
usable typology about what "barter" is, and what "money" is --
which might help them think about whether it is "barter" in the
sense that they are meaning for colonial Marylanders to have used
tobacco as a unit of exchange. (No -- it's "commodity money" --
and, more to the point, you can't use it as a sign that they were
"pre-market" in the sense my colleagues want to. Or, if you want
to, you're going to have to think about what makes gold different
from tobacco as a commodity money.) That's an easy one, I think.
A more complicated one is an example from labor history.
Most historians still draw assumptions about productive labor and
nonproductive labor, for example, from classical and marxist
typologies of the nineteenth century. There are some really
interesting typologies and IDEAS in the new labor economics. I
can't get them to look at it - heck, I can't even SAY that's where
I'm getting some interpretive ideas -- because they are so convinced
that all economists are narrow Chicago neoclassicists. ALL economists.
ANYBODY who works in a U.S. economics department.
I've had trouble getting them to read Nancy Folbre's work. Because
-- well, she's an ECONOMIST, isn't she?
I need terms BEYOND just "economist". Or beyond the difference
between a "Marxist" and a "neoclassical" economist, which are the
only two types that many scholars outside economics recognize.
And I am also presenting the hypothesis that it is no accident
that such terminology appears to be absent. Because economists do
not seem, in general, to be willing to confront the reality that
there are really a number of very very different TYPES of economics
out there WITHIN their own departments. Because to admit that would
be to admit that one theory does not fit all. The closest you can
get an economist to admit OUTSIDE THE DISCIPLINE that there are
major differences in approach that are perfectly acceptable and
accepted WITHIN mainstream economics, is the curt statement,
"Well, I'm write and they're wrong." If it is a Chicago economist,
you can add "And they're stupid, too." Now this may be said
in a joking fashion, but that's what you get. So economics as a
profession is no help at all for me.
Imagine that it is fifty years hence and you are doing research
on the types of economic analysis that emerged in the U.S. between
the end of World War II and 1970. Or, say, 1960 and 1990. How would
you describe to a READER these very real differences? Wouldn't you
want to label them according to schools, or interpretive traditions,
or accepted discourses? I'm looking for a way to do that.
Ball's in play.
-- Mary Schweitzer
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