``To repeat, their analysis benefited greatly from the progress made in mathematics, which had by then become more streamlined, formalized, and-hence-analytically powerful. In particular, they took the notion of "small" (or marginal) change and the principles of optimization as conceptualized in infinitesimal calculus, and applied them fruitfully to the analysis of commodity valuation.
Thus, in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, the neoclassical economists were able to sharpen price analysis in ways that thinkers in the early- and mid-19th century would not even dream of.'' ----------- I picked this passage for several reasons. There is some mathematical and social history needed in some vague form here or before. I think there needs to be a little more emphasis on the heavy role of the state in its capacity to structure society through law, in particular property law. The other little note has to be some mention of the French Revolution and its attempt to restructure society---away from complete control by the nobility, monarchy, and church. These were the largest property holders and their social system rested on the labor of peasants, farmers, and tradesmen. These were supposed to be the beneficiaries of the political revolution, and to some marginal extent did benefit through various political reforms. The other part of the French Revolution was conceptual in the sense of turning the vast bureaucracy of the monarchy and its `societies' into a secular system of a republic and its institutions. The latter were the modern form of bureaus for treasury, commerce, taxes, education, weights and measures, lands, patents, and so forth. The role of mathematics was applied across these systems where the need for ``streamlined, formalized--hence--analytically powerful'' methods were developed. You find the background for the above in the history of mathematics particularly before during and just after the French Revolution. (See Boyer, A History of Mathematics, and chapters 21, 22, 23, Age of Euler, Mathmaticians of the French Revolution, The Time of Gauss and Cauchy.) These developments go the the heart of the idea of society as a system with all the institutional paraphernalia that went into money, time, and machines, the core of capitalist society. The background and foundations of `modern' social sciences all come the same background in the `new sciences of man' during the same period. Economics then gets fitted into this larger pattern. Neoclassicism was a broad movement that was nearly identical to the development of a republican form of government and society, modeled on Enlightenment ideals drawn from studies of antiquity. Anyway, the idea of putting footnotes on the side, as margin notes is great because they get read as if they were illustrations. The other note might be something about how neoclassical economists performed the cordon sanitaire, to abstract The Economy out of a class society context. It wasn't just a rejection of Marx, but of the whole idea of a class society. A republic is not supposed to have classes, since `citizens' are supposed to be equal under law. In such a regime, the maldistribution of wealth then was an issue of individual entrepreneurship or moral turpitude. Nice to see mention of John von Neumann. He is worth a study on his own. I read a bio of him a long time ago. Drank himself to death, but managed to remathematize society in the grand tradition of the French. Lagrange multipliers, Hamiltonians, not to mention Fourier Transforms, set theory, computers, etc. He was part of the Weimar emigre math group that did the wartime calculation tables for ballistics...somewhere in the basement of NYU under Richard Courant. They were also doing some of the number crunching for the Manhatten Project. ``The neoclassicals had simplified the story to the point of rendering it useless for serious practical purposes. Without a proper sense of these prices, the expected profitability of these risky ventures was based on speculation and folly, and considering how important these expenditures were as a source of aggregate demand, the whole of the economy was understandably prone to wild swings.'' One of the interesting things about Keynes was how these ideas impacted the US goverment under Roosevelt and the develoment of the modern state bureaucracy to deal with large scale problems of economic production. The whole system of government and industry in collaboration to militarize the US for war was a re-forumlation and overhaul, which has become fundamental and essential to modern capitalist society. (And I just read the later pages which say pretty much the same thing...) Note about math and science. I think it is a mistake to try to depict economics as a science. Just adding math doesn't make it so anymore than using statistics and probability makes gambling a science. Forget that. Math is highly useful for all sorts of studies, so leave that to suffice. In general I think it is really helpful to embed economics in the social fabric of history, which is what you've done. CG _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
