I see little difference in style and substance between Polly's dismissal of work which fails to disaggragate production, and the way in which those who depend on these constructions dismiss work which chapter and verse spells out the problems with this work -- and the alternatives to it. In other words, Roy is playing the game of begging the question and shifting the burden of proof. As Polly hints, lots of this stuff truly is a matter of professional power play, not explanatory substance, not _explanatory_ power. That's why the game is artificially limited to a formal game with a prior set of artificially stipulated elements. A formal game is more likely to give you clean cut winners and losers, although its interesting to see how what is in bounds of the formal game and what is out of bounds gets bent by the game players over time -- perhaps the most interesting part of the power play. You can see this sort of thing play out all over the place in the history of economic thought. Consider how the profession resisted Gary Becker's novel use of formal elements in the theory of choice -- until younger folks caught on to how great this game could be as a motor for manipulating formal elements in the service of producing publications. I'm not evaluating any of this work. This is what you can see without engaging the merits of the substantive thinking which led folks to resist Becker's "tilting" of the formal playing field or the merits of the substantive thinking which led folks to embrace Becker's re-conceptualizaton of what choice theory was meant to do. I should note that I don't particularly see this formal game playing as necessarily a "male" thing -- although its hard not to perceive that young males tend to predominate at the competitive edge of research in the mathematical sciences. I think Polly is right to suggest that its hard not to think that this fact hasn't shaped the character and institutions of modern economics. Greg Ransom