====================== HES POSTING =================== Michael Gibons wrote: >But why is your point so resisted by economists? It seems to me (as an >pseudo outsider) that economists seem more interested in being like >physicists than, say biologists. That is, they want to believe that what >they are studying has ALWAYS been there, and it is just a question of >finding the right method/theory. If one looks at biology, one gets a >different image of knowledge. If you ask why most male human beings are >larger than most female human beings, the immediate explanation is genetic >and hormonal makeup. But if you ask how that genetic and hormonal make up >came about, the explanation lies in evolution (i.e. history). It seems to >me that economics could use more history. Unfortunately, from what I am >able to gleen from this forum, they consider that problematic, and when >they do approach history, it is rife with a contextual clumsiness that is >almost embarassing (this is getting harsher than I prefer). > I agree. I think that some of economists' clumsiness with history is sheer ignorance. I also think that some of it is a belief that we (economists, that is) are primarily engaged in a *normative* and not a *positive* enterprise: spelling out and developing the consequences of scarcity, of maximizing objective functions under scarcity-imposed constraints, and of the usefulness or uselessness of particular institutions as social calculating mechanisms for solving such problems. Ask someone engaged in that *normative* enterprise what they think of "embeddedness," and they will say that it is irrelevant. Brad De Long ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]