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> 
>Are Brad deLong's questions rhetorical questions meant to be 
>based on study of original texts or  are they based  on secondary  
>digestions?  
>Geert Reuten 
>(University of Amsterdam) 
 
 
My, my... 
 
I believe that it is only by a deliberate attempt to *not* study the  
original texts that one can praise Marx as an economist... 
 
Take a look back at _Wage Labor and Capital_ or _Value, Price, and  
Profit_. It's hard to read them and disagree with Paul Samuelson's  
characterization of Marx as a "minor post-Ricardian." 
 
Some of Marx's other works are much more interesting. _The 18th  
Brumaire_, for example, is a great read. (Never mind for the moment  
that Marx was wrong in his claim that the Legitimists and the  
Orleanists couldn't get together because one party represented  
agricultural and the other industrial capital. Never mind that he was  
wrong in his claim that the peasants were "a sack of potatoes" rather  
than a class--the Paris-region peasants showed that they were a class  
for themselves quite convincingly in June 1848.) There is a lot of  
good history and political analysis in the first volume of _Capital_.  
And as Barkley Rosser pointed out there are shrewd observations about  
technological change scattered throughout the oeuvre. 
 
But an economist? Nahh... 
 
Let me suggest to Geert Reuten that he go read Norbert Elias's _The  
Civilizing Process_ 
 
To Michael Perelman and "tendencies," I would point out that when he  
(or I) highlight and stress a "tendency" in our own work, we are  
implicitly (and explicitly) claiming that this tendency will be a  
powerful shaper of the outcome, not something overwhelmed by other  
factors. At least hold Marx to the same standard. 
 
To Tom Walker I would say that the claim that "the final crisis of  
capitalism is manifest in the need for the constant intervention of  
the state to change the rules every time capital isn't winning"  
doesn't pass the coherence test. If capitalism changes the rules and  
goes on, it isn't the "final crisis," is it? 
 
I would ask Romain Kroes to take a look at the UN _Human Development  
Report_ or the World Bank's _World Development Report_. 
 
To Larry Willmore I would say that we should demand more of even a  
"close runner-up" for the title of greatest economist of the  
millennium than he does. We should demand not just that he try hard  
to analyze the economy, but that his analyses be successful... 
 
To Barkley Rosser, touche--although David Landes has always argued  
that Andrew Ure and Charles Babbage had an earlier and clearer view  
of technological change than did Marx. 
 
Brad De Long 
Berkeley 
 
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