=================== HES POSTING =================== 
 
Just an off-the-cuff response -- 
 
In my experience, economists do not go through the same self-examination 
that many of the rest of the disciplines require in the process of 
becoming a Ph.D.  That is, there is little sense of the value of the 
conversation with the past in research -- if it's older than 5 years, who 
cares?  
 
Perhaps a better way to say this is that of all the scholars I know, 
economists seem to be the LEAST conscious that they exist IN TIME AND 
SPACE.  They seem oblivious to the unconscious influences on their 
thinking, and therefore particularly prone to blend personal beliefs and 
professional research, unable to tell the difference.   
 
I believe you can take a lot of mathematical neoclassical analysis and 
apply it to DIFFERENT problems with a DIFFERENT point of view, a 
DIFFERENT type of hypothesis -- and come up with some pretty "leftist" 
results.  Public choice theory is useful -- until you get to the point 
where you have the chutzpah to equate "self-interest" of rich folks not 
to pay more taxes or to get a government break on an investment with 
"self-interest" of invalids who need support or they will starve.   
 
There is no sense of civic responsibility.  No sense of anything larger 
than their narrow theory.  But is the fault the theory, or the 
POSSIBILITIES in the theory -- or the practitioners?  The leap from the 
IDEA of purchasing government (which really is an old idea) and what 
that MEANS, and how you could construct the institution to prevent that 
as much as possible -- to the theory that EVERYTHING is purchasing 
government, so therefore everything is of equal moral value -- well, 
that's quite a leap, and totally unnecessary.  Must we through the baby 
out with the bathwater and dismiss that whole line of inquiry, because 
of who we found at the end of it? 
 
I've seen the other side too -- historians who know absolutely NOTHING 
about monetary theory blathering away about what "cash" means -- making 
so little sense, and they don't know it.   
 
Also, scholars who are restricted to the written word can find 
themselves trapped in the sequential tyranny of print (as Bruner called 
it) -- A follows B, okay.  B follows C, Okay.  C followd D, okay.  They 
don't question whether B could also produce A1 or A2 or A3.  Alternate 
paths.  Nonlinear conceptializations.  Feedbacks.  These don't fit too 
well if you are constrained to the written paragraph.  Many historians 
think they "know" Marx because they have memorized this sort of a linear 
pattern that they think is theory -- but this learned thinking process 
has left them unable to true discuss and debate theory or causation.   
 
Read the tortuous paragraphs of nineteenth century economists trying to 
explain the workings of the market -- and then look at the diagrams in 
Marshall's first edition of his Principles. What a stunning change in 
heuristic methods!  What took paragraphs was suddenly folded into, 
swoosh swoosh, swoosh swoosh.  Bing.   
 
Similarly, can anyone doubt that the shift into the new labor economics 
was a dramatic improvement over the old static approach to looking at 
labor problems?  From my perspective, it is also a MUCH more 
sophisticated way to approach problems of labor in the past.   
 
Then there is a difference that is not MATH nor NEOCLASSICISM precisely 
-- but rather the devotion to the falsifiable hypothesis.  No concept 
that we are better off being able to use what information we have, 
rather than limiting ourselves only to information that can be "directly 
falsifiable with statistical methodology."  The information can be  
highly mathematical.  But -- you don't come out with a SOLE perfect 
solution, but with a RANGE of possible solutions, that DEPEND on other 
factors.  It's valuable to know about that range, and to speculate on 
how that range changes when this or that part of the model shifts.  Yet 
there are those who throw all that away because it doesn't "prove" 
anything.   
 
This isn't math vs. nonmath.  This is a very narrow sense of WHAT IS 
KNOWLEDGE.  At what point do you do more harm by throwing out 
information because cannot be fit into the falsifiable hypothesis? 
 
The problem is not math.  The problem is not even neoclassicism.  The 
problem is isolation.  There is no sense of context, of where the 
information coming out of this branch of economics FITS with information 
coming from OTHER sources.  There is no space in the program for 
"foreign" sources of knowledge, so to speak.  Economics has never been 
as isolated as i tis today, with courses in history of economics and 
economic history relegated to minor electives and unavailable in many 
major graduate programs.  I still shake my head over the young 
University of Chicago graduate who asked me, with all sincerity, to 
explain the labor theory of value to him. 
 
And the isolation is worse because it is now intra-disciplinary 
isolation, not merely inter-disciplinary isolation.  Even the language 
used in some subdisciplines of economics have a diferent meaning in 
others. 
 
I find economists extraordinarily squeamish about aditting "schools of 
thought" in economics -- even the standard macro differences between 
MIT/Penn, Chicago, and Minnesota (if it's still there).  There is 
something about the training that makes it very difficult to admit there 
could be multiple approaches, leading to multiple "truth's".  So the 
isolation is greater:  one is not only isolated WITHIN economics, not 
only isolated WITHIN this generation of economists, but also isolated 
WITHIN your own particular specialty. 
 
I'm not sure if I can explain this right, but to me the goal would be to 
figure out how to USE the techniques and ideas while maintaining the 
density of knowledge of other disciplines and ways of knowing.  To 
connect the information and ideas gained in one branch with that from 
another.   
 
What I hear now is kind of the same pattern in reverse -- we have to 
kill neoclassicism and math, because that's not "our truth."  Rather 
than "what can we USE from this approach to economics?" 
 
Mary Schweitzer, Assoc. Prof., Dept. of History, Villanova Univ. (on 
indefinite medical leave since January 1995) 
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