----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- [Posted on behalf of Bob Goldfard. -- RBE] In response to my "revised Schulz assertion" Roy Weintraub asked: > "Just what might you mean by progress when you use it in in this > sentence?" Good question. I have not read Morgan/Morrison, nor am I sure I have a good answer for Weintraub, but for the sake of provoking more discussion, here goes: I think of "progress" in a "modelling tradition/approach" as the ability of that approach to widen the range of "interesting/relevant" phenomena it is able to provide "within modelling framework" explanations for. While I am not a historian of thought, I will nonetheless offer an example just to (again) try to help provoke discussion. In my earlier life as a labor economist, I thought a lot about the well-documented existence of large wage differentials "for the same job" within a geographical labor market. As a "neoclassical approach to labor economics sympathizer," I would have viewed it as important progress for that modelling approach if the "neoclassical view" could produce a ("reasonably convincing in the context of that framework") explanation for the apparent continuing existence of those same-job-in-the-same-geographical-market wage differentials. This would widen the range of interesting/relevant phenomena the framework was providing explanations for.... (NOTE: I used so many quotation marks in the above paragraphs in response to Weintraub's criticism that I had been "quotation-mark deficient.") Bob Goldfarb ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]