David Colander:

"I see the macroeconomic policy problem differently. In my version of this joke, the economist loses.
The reason why is that in the building process, the builders continually adjusted the plans, creating
the gerrymandered system that is our economy. They created a variety of different blueprints,
replacing one set with another, and they never marked down their adjustments on the blueprints.
So the standard economist reading from the blueprints got the wrong answer."




I apologize if this takes one farther from the original query. But in his separation of theory from policy, David Colander's description of the actual building of cathedrals and the role of blueprints reminded me of couple of comments by Warren Samuels in his reflections on Veblen in the Journal of Economic Issues (1995). He writes:

"Veblen was the great demystyfier. He emphasized that human arrangements are in a process of Darwinian evolutionary flux., without ultimate ontological causation, meaning, or normative status."

"The reason why Veblen provided no blueprint for the future, aside from some relatively innocent but informed speculations, is that he believed that the future would have to be worked out, that one could not set it forth once and for all time. Veblen was a true existentialist, pragmatist, instrumentalist, and evolutionist; the world of future would have to be made by those who applied their tests of workability and so on, not by some armchair intellectual."

A far cry from the GET and gothic cathedrals. And if I understand Matías Vernengo's question: "Or are you just saying that no general theory (no blueprint) is ever possible, and we have only case studies?" Veblen answer would be a YES to the first part, no?

Sumitra Shah