I have come across a telling comment by Alan Wolfe in his review of The Age of Fracture, by Daniel Rogers, the book recommended by Brad Bateman not long ago here. It refers to  the origin of macro-micro split (the recent lengthy discussions on the list) and the latest exchange about the Coase theorem. Okay, it is not in anyway supposed to advance the discourse, but it made me think of the fortuitous finding of it!

Cheers,

Sumitra Shah



The quote from The New Republic, March 10, 2011, (about the last half of the 20th century):



All this changed over the course of subsequent decades, in large part because thinkers stopped thinking big. Economics is exemplary. It was not so much that Keynes lost ground to Hayek—both, after all, were European idea men shaped by the events of their tragic century. It was instead that the micro usurped the macro. The key figure in this regard is a relatively obscure University of Chicago law professor named Ronald Coase, who in 1960 urged judges not to focus on abstract questions of justice but to decide cases based upon overall economic benefit. “As economics emerged from the disciplinary crisis of the 1970s and early 1980s,” Rodgers writes, “its focus was no longer on systemwide stabilization or the interplay of aggregates. Economics was about the complex play of optimizing behavior—a thought experiment that began with individuals and the exchanges they made.” There was no longer such a thing as society, as Margaret Thatcher both informed the British and lectured the Americans, at least as far as those building economic models were concerned.