E. Roy Weintraub wrote:

“... We represent, re-represent, and re-re-represent the local and contingent stories that engage us.”

This debate reminds me a past debate that took place on the SHOE – list last year on the “Coase Theorem.” The
fate of what Ronald Coase said was similar: R Coase did not say what the text book representations of the “Coase
Theorem” have come to mean. This historical situation has not changed over years. It seems it won’t.

I think the problem is not that “we represent, re present, and re re re present ...” I think economists rather
mis – represent and mis – mis – represent etc. what was “really” said. Such mis – representations do always not
fade out. (And when mis –representations fade out, they do not fade out fully and perfectly.) One of the reasons
for this is that economists do not “replicate” the findings of past economic research, i.e. economists do not
read historical (original – ?) research. (They do not even cite historical / original work.) What appear in
economic textbooks, as a consequence, are those which are reproduced, instead of those which are replicated.
James Wible called this phenomenon “replication failure” in his The Economics of Science: Methedology and
Epistemology as if Economics Really Mattered (1998). Replication failure might be one of the reasons how we got
here in economics.

I tried to put this argument forth in a paper on “intellectual path dependency” which I presented during the
2010 HES meeting in Syracuse. It is available as a SSRN working paper: “The ‘Coase Theorem’ vs. Coase Theorem
Proper: How an Error Emerged and Remained Uncorrected for So Long.”

Best wishes,

Altug Yalcintas
Ankara University