Re: the recent request for info on firm behaviour a la claims in a textbook regarding the pervasiveness of 'price-takers'. This request is apropos an earlier exchange on the 'best' introductory textbooks for use by dissidents. It is true that firms in the Fortune 500 are subject to competition. There is certainly no longer that 'market power' possessed by US industry leaders in the glorious days of the 50s and 60s (vide, John Blair, Economic Concentration 1972). But the competition is a different sort of competition to that in the textbooks. Concern with the pervasiveness of price-takers is tinkering on the margin. The more important consideration is that the neoclassical theory of the firm has no relevance (read NO RELEVANCE) to real world firms. The neoclassical firm is an analytical construct for reasons of methodological and ideolgoical purity. It is not even a first approximation, and was not even relevant in earlier simpler age. You can not get to the real world from the neoclassicasl theory of competition (and of the firm). The neoclassical firm lives in a different epistemological space to attempts at analysis of real world firms. A propos earlier concerns about preferable texts for dissidents. It follows that any text centred on neoclassical theory involves a serious diverting of the precious educational process briefly available to young people on their way to maturity. Even a course centred predominantly on critique is still distorting, because where can a student go if they know nothing but critique? Students need reasonable approahces to the right questions if they are to function as professionals. It is possible that dissidents have to teach 'micro' courses in order to keep their jobs. But let's be clear about the motives. On the other hand, it appeaers that there is a very large number of dissidents out there. Though the socailisation process and the repression in economics is virulent, is it possible that it succeeds because dissidents consent to it more than they need to? Re the recent discussion of the establishment hierarchical listing of departments - is it not possible to have a collective repudiastion of thelisting? To throw out the whole array of establishment paraperhnalia - AEA, AER, etc. Tell them to go jump, and stop stuffing around the margin hoping for tolerance and a modicum of respectability. In general, is it not possible, like the hero broadcaster in the movie (name forgotten) who leans out the window and screams "I've had enough and I'm not going to take it anymore!"? Isn't it now possible for dissidents to be hiring each other? In short, isn't it time for another pedagogical and organisational revolution, a la the late 1960s? I have the privilege of teaching in a department which had a revolution in the early 70s, the structures surviving the reaction. And our students get jobs, indeed are often preferred, because they can think about the big picture (and can write!). We have had the experience (over 20 years) of relegating neoclassical economics to its appropriate place and have got away with it. Even dissidents can overstate the necessity for teaching neoclassical economics. All this know your enemy stuff is crap. The real enemy is not the academic version of neoclassical economics, but the popularised versions which thrive in the propaganda organs, in politics and in policy-making. They are of course related, but they are not identical, and one can get to the propaganda versions more directly (as most of its adherents do!). One can teach neoclasisical economics in a history of thought context - as a methodological and ideological resolution of certain intellectual and political dilemmas - understood through a sociological analysis. Neoclassical economics rots students' tender brains. It's a religion that is very difficult to escape from. Let's face it - as teachers of 'economics', neoclassical economics is the easy option, a crutch to bypass the difficult issues of appropriate topics, appropriate approahces - the huge black hole of uncertainty about how the capitalist world runs, where it's going, and what we can do about it. Finding useful teaching materials in this void is of courrse immensely time-consuming, which is why the special publications and the teaching lists put out by URPE, Dollars & SEnse, etc are so important. But even a shitty 1000 word article from the Wall Street Journal is a better teaching device than any chapter out of any mainstream text. Why should we be forced to mess up our brief lives with the extraordinary deviousness of these textbook writers who want to claim that black is white? Yours Evan Jones [EMAIL PROTECTED]
