----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- I want to agree with Peter's remark, with one caveat. Clearly, whatever orthodoxy is today, it is not your father's orthodoxy. The problem for the survival of OIE is not that institutions and related subjects are being ignored by orthodoxy but rather the reverse. Previously forbidden terrain is now the turf of dissertations, stuff published across the spectrum of orthodox journals, and Nobel awardees. In addition to economic history and Stiglitz et al. on information issues, the deification of Coase stands out, as does the Public Choice and Social Choice work of Buchanan, Olson, et al. The empirical work on comparative growth wouldn't exist without the incorporation of scores of political and social indicators. The explosion of interest in the problems of transition, the shift from one institutional regime to another in the old Eastern Bloc, may be the most compelling historical influence on the revaluation of different ways of thinking in economics. Even game theory, whatever its limitations, has been tortured into some degree of relevance in looking at human interactions. I have reservations about experimental economics, but here too there has been much more deflation than inflation of whatever is left of the rational economic person. Finally, since one could go on, in my field of development economics or, better, economic development, nobody talks anymore about savings, capital, and so on, and it is pretty much wall to wall institutions and institutional reform, and I don't mean just pro-market reform at all. I might use the umbrella term governance to cover a range of institutional issues. My caveat is the old distinction between agency and structure. Orthodoxists still try to ground most of their work on individual decisions and choices while institutionalists put the person in the context of culture and institutions, but in a manner much less deterministic than a few decades ago. And, no, Alice, I don't know of any accessible middle ground reconciling the two. When is the last time anyone who would call itself an institutionalist was heard to say anything of commanding interest? I opined over ten years ago that "we had won" and it was time to declare victory and move on, to what I was more coy about. I've never been one to accept the whining loser line. John "OIE" Adams University of Virginia ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]