----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- On Allais, one of the real issues is the excessive set of claims made both by Allais, and his pupils/supporters, on his behalf over many years. For instance, it has been argued in print in a number of places that Allais "discovered/proved" the first real stability theorems for a competitive equilbrium in his (untranslated) 1943 A la recherche d'une discipline economique: Premiere partie: l'economie pure (accents omitted, sorry). This claim is, frankly, rubbish.For documentation, see pp. 76-86 in my Stabilizing Dynamics (1991). This kind of claim is not unique. For a particularly astonishing self- presentation of "How I got it right and everyone else did not" see Allais's "Theories of General Economic Equilibrium and Maximum Efficiency" in G. Schwodiauer's (1978) Euilibrium and Disequilibrium in Economic Theory. In the footnotes to this paper we have a masterful and zany reconstruction of the history of GE Theory from the French perspective. Allais's self-presentation is quite similar to the kind of nonsense uncovered by Leonard in his EJ paper "Reading Nash, Reading Cournot" in which a French game theory history is constructed (by French authors) forwards and backwards in time to eliminate Nash's contribution from serious consideration. It all reminds me of the old Soviet claims that everything good in the world, from airplanes to gelato, from penicillin to baseball, was created by a Soviet citizen. Perhaps this self-aggrandizement has its roots in the lack of criticism faced in the academic system by senior professors in France in past decades? (Pierre Bourdieu's Homo Academicus (1988) is useful on this topic.) E. Roy Weintraub ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]