My purpose was to bring up again the main points of Brad and Roger's 
column: there is a place for detailed inquiries into "the business of 
every day life"; but there is also a place for an examination of the big 
picture, and the column asks that economists start examining it. 
Extrapolating from their column, some questions that come to mind are, 
What kind of economy do we want? What is the purpose of an economy? What 
relationship should the economy have to the other spheres of life? 
Indeed, what kind of society do we want and what is the role of the 
economy in it? No doubt everyone on this list has ready answers to those 
questions and can quote from any number of authorities in supporting 
their answers. But I suspect that Brad and Roger's plea is that we 
perhaps not be so ready with our answers and to think anew about our 
assumptions, preconceptions, prejudices, axioms, and the like.

Paul

On 11/14/2011 1:34 PM, [log in to unmask] wrote:
> Are we all supposed to set aside detailed inquiries into 'the business 
> of every day life' and turn our attention wholly to the 'big picture'? 
> There must be thousands of other economists like me who are diffident 
> about our ability to add anything of value to the kind of conversation 
> that Smith and Marx and Mill and Keynes and Hayek and Friedman are 
> said to have promoted, and more modest in the scientific goals we set 
> for ourselves. I hope that Paul's message is not that we are wasting 
> our time.
>
> Anthony Waterman
>
> -----Original Message----- From: Paul Dudenhefer
> Sent: Monday, November 14, 2011 8:33 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: [SHOE] Backhouse and Bateman, "Wanted: Worldly Philosophers"
>
> As we all know, Roger and Brad's column has generated all sorts of
> responses--many of them stimulating and illuminating in their own
> right--but it seems fair to remind everyone that the purpose of their
> article is to ask economists to engage again in the kind of big-picture
> thinking that Smith and Marx and Mill and Keynes and Hayek and Friedman
> engaged in. As they point out, the recent generations of economists have
> been trained to take the "dentistry" approach, for reasons that are not
> hard to understand. What Brad and Roger are calling for is for
> economists to return again to discussing what has become its fundamental
> subject, capitalism, developing a new vision of what capitalism is and
> means, and, as they state in their concluding sentence, "asking the hard
> questions that can shape a new vision of capitalism's potential."
>
> Yours sincerely,
> Paul
>

-- 
Paul Dudenhefer
Managing Editor, HOPE
213 Social Science Building
Box 90097
Duke University
Durham, NC 27708-0097
919-660-6899
www.dukeupress.edu
http://hope.econ.duke.edu/