Jim Devine: >I really like the short discussions we on pen-l have about "biomass," >Pinochet, etc. along with Dave Richardson's posting of the news from the US >Labor Department and Louis Proyect's and others' postings of articles from >the mainstream media. After all, a wide coverage of a large number of >different topics is part of political economics. > >But are political economists to leave economic theory to the neoclassicals? I don't think that these sorts of "off-topic" postings are displacing economic theory posts, which was Jerry Levy's complaint as I recall. After LBO-Talk got started, there was no traffic to speak of on PEN-L for weeks and weeks when all the professional economists had the list virtually to themselves. I think something else is going on, which I am in no position to evaluate. In the deepest economic crisis since WWII, there is virtually no discussion of it on PEN-L. This is not caused by "off-topic" posts but by something else. As Brutus said, "The fault is not in the stars..." Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
