----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- Oh, here's another one probably to stay away from, especially just at the peak of the holidays, but what the heck. I fully agree that dominant groups fund research that supports their goals, that many economists kowtow to this and go along with it, in some cases in a cowardly and shameful way as Fred Lee points out, that heterodoxy is being and has been suppressed, that many economists who view themselves as simply pure scientists are in various ways simply deluding themselves, and that for better or worse the RAND Corp. played a very important role in the development of modern economics in the 1950s. However, be all that as it may, it strikes me that this is a very complicated business. Thus, one of the most important economic ideas that received huge stimulus from RAND was game theory. Does game theory necessarily support the capitalist system or the US against the Soviet Union? Certainly its developers at RAND were more interested in its applications to actual war, nuclear showdowns and whatnot, than to economics, which was a strictly secondary matter. The most famous game theory ideas coming out of RAND were the Nash equilibrium and the prisoner's dilemma. Well, guess what? The prisoner's dilemma shows very pointedly that Nash equilibria are not necessarily Pareto optimal, indeed are frequently not so. In what way did this development of game theory support some kind of ideological Cold War agenda related to the support of capitalism against socialism? Barkley Rosser ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]