=================== HES POSTING =================== Just an off-the-cuff response -- In my experience, economists do not go through the same self-examination that many of the rest of the disciplines require in the process of becoming a Ph.D. That is, there is little sense of the value of the conversation with the past in research -- if it's older than 5 years, who cares? Perhaps a better way to say this is that of all the scholars I know, economists seem to be the LEAST conscious that they exist IN TIME AND SPACE. They seem oblivious to the unconscious influences on their thinking, and therefore particularly prone to blend personal beliefs and professional research, unable to tell the difference. I believe you can take a lot of mathematical neoclassical analysis and apply it to DIFFERENT problems with a DIFFERENT point of view, a DIFFERENT type of hypothesis -- and come up with some pretty "leftist" results. Public choice theory is useful -- until you get to the point where you have the chutzpah to equate "self-interest" of rich folks not to pay more taxes or to get a government break on an investment with "self-interest" of invalids who need support or they will starve. There is no sense of civic responsibility. No sense of anything larger than their narrow theory. But is the fault the theory, or the POSSIBILITIES in the theory -- or the practitioners? The leap from the IDEA of purchasing government (which really is an old idea) and what that MEANS, and how you could construct the institution to prevent that as much as possible -- to the theory that EVERYTHING is purchasing government, so therefore everything is of equal moral value -- well, that's quite a leap, and totally unnecessary. Must we through the baby out with the bathwater and dismiss that whole line of inquiry, because of who we found at the end of it? I've seen the other side too -- historians who know absolutely NOTHING about monetary theory blathering away about what "cash" means -- making so little sense, and they don't know it. Also, scholars who are restricted to the written word can find themselves trapped in the sequential tyranny of print (as Bruner called it) -- A follows B, okay. B follows C, Okay. C followd D, okay. They don't question whether B could also produce A1 or A2 or A3. Alternate paths. Nonlinear conceptializations. Feedbacks. These don't fit too well if you are constrained to the written paragraph. Many historians think they "know" Marx because they have memorized this sort of a linear pattern that they think is theory -- but this learned thinking process has left them unable to true discuss and debate theory or causation. Read the tortuous paragraphs of nineteenth century economists trying to explain the workings of the market -- and then look at the diagrams in Marshall's first edition of his Principles. What a stunning change in heuristic methods! What took paragraphs was suddenly folded into, swoosh swoosh, swoosh swoosh. Bing. Similarly, can anyone doubt that the shift into the new labor economics was a dramatic improvement over the old static approach to looking at labor problems? From my perspective, it is also a MUCH more sophisticated way to approach problems of labor in the past. Then there is a difference that is not MATH nor NEOCLASSICISM precisely -- but rather the devotion to the falsifiable hypothesis. No concept that we are better off being able to use what information we have, rather than limiting ourselves only to information that can be "directly falsifiable with statistical methodology." The information can be highly mathematical. But -- you don't come out with a SOLE perfect solution, but with a RANGE of possible solutions, that DEPEND on other factors. It's valuable to know about that range, and to speculate on how that range changes when this or that part of the model shifts. Yet there are those who throw all that away because it doesn't "prove" anything. This isn't math vs. nonmath. This is a very narrow sense of WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE. At what point do you do more harm by throwing out information because cannot be fit into the falsifiable hypothesis? The problem is not math. The problem is not even neoclassicism. The problem is isolation. There is no sense of context, of where the information coming out of this branch of economics FITS with information coming from OTHER sources. There is no space in the program for "foreign" sources of knowledge, so to speak. Economics has never been as isolated as i tis today, with courses in history of economics and economic history relegated to minor electives and unavailable in many major graduate programs. I still shake my head over the young University of Chicago graduate who asked me, with all sincerity, to explain the labor theory of value to him. And the isolation is worse because it is now intra-disciplinary isolation, not merely inter-disciplinary isolation. Even the language used in some subdisciplines of economics have a diferent meaning in others. I find economists extraordinarily squeamish about aditting "schools of thought" in economics -- even the standard macro differences between MIT/Penn, Chicago, and Minnesota (if it's still there). There is something about the training that makes it very difficult to admit there could be multiple approaches, leading to multiple "truth's". So the isolation is greater: one is not only isolated WITHIN economics, not only isolated WITHIN this generation of economists, but also isolated WITHIN your own particular specialty. I'm not sure if I can explain this right, but to me the goal would be to figure out how to USE the techniques and ideas while maintaining the density of knowledge of other disciplines and ways of knowing. To connect the information and ideas gained in one branch with that from another. What I hear now is kind of the same pattern in reverse -- we have to kill neoclassicism and math, because that's not "our truth." Rather than "what can we USE from this approach to economics?" Mary Schweitzer, Assoc. Prof., Dept. of History, Villanova Univ. (on indefinite medical leave since January 1995) mailto:[log in to unmask] ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]