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Date: | Fri Mar 31 17:18:22 2006 |
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=================== HES POSTING ====================
It is arguable that the single place where -- more than any other --
contemporary economists learned the word 'neoclassical' was Paul
Samuelson's mega-best seller _Economics_. It was Paul Samuelson, indeed,
who gave us the 'neoclassical synthesis'. Now Samuelson's work may be a
hodge-podge of inconsistent and unworkable ideas, but for whatever defects
that may lie inherent in that work, one thing cannot be said, that is, it
cannot be said that this in not neoclassical economics. It is indeed, the
very stuff of which most folks learned to use the very word. So we do
have some neoclassical economics, contained between the covers of a
textbook which has been on the bookself of most economists in the later
half of the twentieth century. We may not be able to construct a very
good or coherent 'essence' out of this thing found in Samuelson's book --
but then that is not so unusual. We don't have a very good essential
definition of continental philosophy or interpretive sociology either.
For all that the words have work they do, and they do pick out different
things in the world. The stuff in Samuelson's textbook is not the
economics of Hayek or Marx, and using the label of 'neoclassical' which
Samuelson claimed for his own -- with a multi-million reader megaphone --
to label the less well know work of Marx or Hayek can only deeply mislead
all those folks who first learned the word as it was taught to them at the
knee of their first economics professor out of Samuelson's textbook.
We've got a word, lots of folks learned it and came to identify it with an
incredibly influential set of ideas. These ideas are quite obviously
different from those of folks like Marx and Hayek. I don't see what the
trouble is in using the word. And the term does not have to be used
normatively. Calling Samuelson a 'neoclassical', using Samuelson's own
language for his own ideas, doesn't necessarily have to be a disparaging
remark. (It is worth noting that Samuelson is also the person from whom
so many first learned the term 'mainstream' economics -- this refered to
Samuelson's own economics, of course.)
Greg Ransom
Dept. of Philosophy
MiraCosta College
UC-Riverside
[log in to unmask]
http://members.aol.com/gregransom/hayekpage.htm
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