right, so Arrow, Hahn and others all know what's up... but we have "practical
men and ill-trained theorists" e.g. half our colleagues, high school economics
teachers, reporters, politicians, economics courses required in other programs
like Masters Programs in Public Policy, Environmental Studies, whatever, all
running around arguing that we should let the "free market" solve problems like
pollution, nonrenewable resources, education, health care, etc., everything
basically, based on the support of these models... of course as Hahn said in the
quote I provided, there are other problems as well, all they showed was
existence of equilibrium, not stability; then there are the problems with
capital and marginal productivity theory demonstrated in the capital critiques,
then there is the DMS (Debreu-Mantel-Sonnenschein) excess demand problem; these
are internal critiques. Then there are the external critiques (methodological
individualism, perfect competition, utility maximization, etc.). But it
continues to be taught, continues to be the conventional wisdom, continues to
influence policy, ...
-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Phillips [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2001 11:09 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [PEN-L:7851] Re: Re: RE: Re: RE: Critique of mathematical
economics
On 7 Feb 01, at 8:44, Jim Devine wrote:
>
> I believe Debreu doesn't care enough about reality to deal with such issues.
>
> Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
>
Jim,
Didn't I hear somewhere that Debreu when he accepted his Nobel
(sic) he said that he developed GE theory just to prove it was
impossible in reality? Does anyone else remember hearing or
seeing this?
Paul
Paul Phillips,
Economics,
University of Manitoba
