Some time ago Dave Colander and Bob Coats put out a book of readings
entitled "The Dissemination of Economic Ideas". They suggested that
some of the concepts of "mainstream" and not-so-mainstream economics
be systematically applied to the economic profession in particular
and academia in general. The articles discussed institutional
rewards, penalties, sanctions, pathways through which what is
"acceptable", truly "scientific", "orthodoxy", "heresy", etc are
defined and enforced.
The works spoke of clone networks, scholar despotism, paradigm
tyrrany and mechanisms of marginalization of the "non-acceptable"
paradigms and scholars. They didn't spend much space discussing the
real interests, contradictions and power structures governing the
definition of the "permissible" or "acceptable" versus "heresy" and
the non-acceptable. There was some reference to the declining--if any-
-schooling in history of economic thought/analysis in the graduate
schools (one thing about training in the history of economic
thought/analysis is that one quickly learns that often what is new is
not true and what is true is not new).
The bottom line is that advancement in academia depends partly (more
than teaching ability or commitment) on not only publishing or
perishing, but publishing in the "right", "acceptable" or
"prestigious" journals. The so-called "prestigious" and "mainstream"
journals allow discussions only within the "dominant" paradigms
generally hence the focus amoong some radicals of staying "within"
neoclassical limits while simultaneously purporting to attack the
paradigm or at least blatant limitations of it; even articles on
Chaos theory and path dependency are still considered "radical" in
many circles although some of the neoclassicals are now claiming they
have been doing non-linear dynamics all along.
The problem in debates with neoclassicals is that they want you step
inside their little box (tools, assumtions, taxonomies, terms,
definitions, categories, meaningless tautologies etc) but will never
step outside their box and inside someone else's little box--first and
foremost because most have read very little outside the "permissible"
neoclassical stuff. Graduate Students who don't want to operate in
any way within the neoclassical world must find the few programs that
will allow this--and most of those programs have been marginalized
within the "profession."
Personally I find some of the work of Bowles et al interesting but
essentially like trying to put a bandage on a still-birth. I also
find in some of the work some of the same formalism and technique-
over-substance-or-practical-significance fetishes. I find the same in
some of the articles in RRPE--now publications in RRPE are indeed
"acceptable" on one's CV. That's just my opinion but I think it is an
opinion more widely shared than openly admitted. Further, for those
who say that NC theory represents the highest level in theory of
individual choice, I question that assertion; that causes one to fall
into the technique-over-substance trap with the notion that because a
model embodies some elegant quantification or even "state-of-the-art"
econometrics (data essentially used to "test" a-priori-based
syllogisms, models and "predictions") means about as much as the
deductive validity of "All Cats are Dogs", "All dogs are blue"
and "therefore" "All cats are blue".
Noting the fallacy of appeal to authority and for thought and
discussion purposes only, I have always been taken with Samir Amin's
summary in "Accumulation on a World Scale":
"Abandoning the universal outlook introduced by
Marxism, breaking down the bridges that the latter had
laid between the various branches of social science in
its attempt to explain history, neoclassical economics
was led to become, first and foremost, an algebra of
logical deductions from a certain number of axioms based
on a sketchy psychology of 'eternal man'."
"The conceptual equipment of this 'pure' economic theory is
situated at a level of abstraction that makes it useless for
analyzing the working of the mechanisms--even the economic
mechanisms--of any society whatsoever..."
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