----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- I am largely in agreement with Michael P. Lynch's assesment of Allais, but, by the same token, I don't disagree with E. Roy Weintraub either. I am willing to accept that Allais might seem to suffer a disprortionate persecution complex and his self-aggrandizement and scathing commentaries on "Anglo-Saxon" contemporaries is inadmissably catty, bordering on the offensive. I take that to be an idiosyncratic quirk in the man. We see evidence of this quirkiness already in his youthful work, ARDE (1944) (for which he was given a tongue-lashing by, I think, Oskar Morgenstern), so I suspect it has been in Allais's personality all along, and is not an "outcome" of the French professorial system. Be that as it may, it is not enough reason to denigrate his contributions or pooh-pooh his complaints as delirium. I believe it is perfectly legitimate for Allais to stake a claim for correct attribution -- if it is due. For instance, his claim that Samuelson "robbed" him of the utility possibilities frontier is exaggerated, but he did develop it before Samuelson and the profession has not been in a hurry to correct that. This happened with OLG as well, although that has, by and large, been recently rectified. By way of comparison, not all Soviet claims to originality are illegitimate either (e.g. I understand there is sufficient evidence to confirm that Alexander Popov invented the wireless telegraph before Marconi.) Allais's contribution to the Schwodiauer volume is effectively a methodological "announcement" of his Theorie General de Surplus (1981 in Economie et Societes, published as a book in 1989). I consider that piece of work (the book, not the article) remarkable, but I must admit that I "feel" like I understand more than perhaps I really do. But, acknowledging that, I find it insightful and original and certainly deserves more attention. Allais's tale is more a "visionary" sketch of a story than a hard-boiled "theory". The ideas Allais develops in that book fits almost hand-in-glove to that being developed (with no less grandiose majesty) by Ostroy and Makowski (e.g. 1998, JET). In fact, it actually holds a family resemblance to Weintraub and Graham (1975)! However, I think Allais (& Makowski & Ostroy) fall short in detailing the proper nitty-gritty dynamics of their surplus-elimination "arbitrage" process. The two most underdeveloped points are information structures and the details of what (in my reading) ought to be a random trade process. On another note, for Allais's new welfare measure, I'd recommend David Luenberger's work on the "benefit function" (J Math Econ, c. 1992 I think), which shares many of its features. As far as Allais's "French" reading of the history of general equilibrium, it is a reading which I do not find wholly illegitimate. It strays from the canonical Cambridge-centered tale, but remains interesting nonetheless and quite refreshing. But Allais is not an intellectual historian (although he has tried his hand at other fields of history) and I would presume that his attempt to place his own theories in a historical thoroughfare, while a bit self-serving, could be forgiven. As far as his claim to have done the "dynamics" of general equilibrium, I agree wholeheartedly with Roy Weintraub's assessment in his "Stabilizing Dynamics". But let it remain that although I think Allais should occasionally wash his mouth out with soap, I think his contributions were real and insightful. His Nobel prize was well-deserved and I think the English-speaking community would benefit from a translation of the Theorie Generale de Surplus (if anyone is up to the task!) Incidentally, does anybody have links about the previously-mentioned movement of French economics students and their positions other than that e-mail? The only thing I could find online regarding Allais's position on things of this sort was a 1999 article in Le Figaro at: http://perso.wanadoo.fr/claude.rochet/EU/art/allais.html Goncalo Fonseca ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]