INTRODUCTION: This is a good debate, in that I find I'm learning
something from it, clarifying my thoughts. One crucial thing is that
it seems to me that it's possible to argue forever on the role of
"scarcity," partly because the concept is well-nigh tautological for a
usually market-oriented economy such as capitalism: Wherever there are
markets, you can say scarcity plays a role, since scarcity plays a
role on the supply side. So, to me, the crucial issues are not really
about scarcity _per se_ but about:
1) natural scarcity vs. artificial scarcity. The scarcity-driven
paradigm in economics (of Walras, Debreu, etc.) sees only natural or
technological scarcity as crucial. Marx and other institutionalists
saw artificial scarcity as added to any natural scarcity.
(In my article in THE REVIEW OF SOCIAL ECONOMY a few years ago, I
represented the liberal or neoclassical paradigm by a Venn diagram
with two circles (wants and natural-technological limits); the Marxian
or (more generally) institutionalist research program adds the
"artificial institutions" circle -- which cannot be reduced to the
other two -- to the diagram. The concept of artificial scarcity
captures this notion.)
2) whether or not the scarcity constraint is binding. The
scarcity-driven paradigm sees the absolute scarcity of the factors of
production as constraining the economy. The alternative view might be
what Ajit Sinha called the "surplus paradigm" (of Ricardo, Marx, the
neo-Ricardians, etc.), which presumes that the normal state of affairs
involves (involuntarily) unemployed labor-power, underutilized means
of producition, and the like. As a growth-oriented (rather than
static-minded) paradigm, this view also emphasizes the production of a
surplus-product and accumulation from that surplus-product.
One version of the Marxian or institutionalist program might see the
institutional constraint as binding, too. But how does that work? the
Marxian/institutionalist program that I'm helping to develop would see
the non-scarcity of labor-power and the like as part and parcel of the
institutional constraint.
For sake of discussion, let's define the "scarcity-based theory of
value" as involving only natural-technical scarcity, which is
_binding_.
Let's get to the old debate, with some headlines to clarify what's
being discussed. BTW, if Gil wants to interpret the above
clarification as a symptom of his winning the discussion, that's fine
with me.
[A. Not a Criticism.]
Gil wrote:>>>"Labor cost of production" theory is most coherently
understood as a (very) special case of a scarcity-based theory of
value.<<<
I responded:>>Gil should note that this is true only for _one_
interpretation of political economy ... i.e., that dominated by the
scarcity-based paradigm (dominated by neoclassical economics,
especially its Walrasian-utopian form), which sees "value" and "price"
as well-nigh synonymous. There exist other visions or paradigms, to
say the least ... <<
Gil now:> I don't see the basis for Jim's criticism here.<
This wasn't meant as a criticism; it was simply trying to put your
criticism of Marx (your reduction of his law of value to a special
case of the scarcity-driven paradigm, it seems) into context. You once
argued on pen-l with Ajit that the neo-Ricardian cost-determined price
system was nothing but a special case of the Walrasian orthodoxy. Is
current foray seems part of this trend? Are you arguing for Walras
über alles, as far as price theory goes?
(There is an alternative view, of course: if the Walrasian scarcity
theory of value is bogus, and the Marxian value theory is a special
case of that theory, then the latter is bogus too.)
I guess I have to restate my request (which, again, what NOT a
criticism): please explain what _you_ mean by the "scarcity-based
theory of value." How does it differ from what I sketched above?
First, in all my comments I was careful to distinguish effects on
values and on (cost-) prices. There is a connection between the two,
in that something that has an opportunity cost in terms of labor
expended necessarily has an opportunity cost in the neoclassical sense
(although not vice versa), but I never treated values and prices as
identical. ....<
It's not YOU that treats price and value as well-nigh synonymous, but
the Walrasian orthodoxy that has dominated the economics profession
for years.
[B. Walras/Debreu vs. Marx (idealist vs. materialist method).]
FWIW, I also don't see the basis for Jim's suggestion that the
"Walrasian-utopian form" (whatever that is) of neoclassical economics
"especially" dominates the scarcity-based paradigm. Walrasian
analysis, while still important, is hardly the dominant thread of
contemporary mainstream economics.<
It's true that game theory, behavioral/experimental economics, etc.,
are all the rage these days, but when it comes to price theory, the
Walrasian story is still dominant. Maybe I'm wrong, but what price
theory has replaced it? have economists have stopped producing CGE
models or trying to represent economies in terms of markets that
relate only by way of relative prices? Have game theorists stopped
justifying (legitimating) their work in terms on some n-person games
being a version of general equilibrium models?
Oh, by the way, sorry about the redundancy "Walrasian-utopian" (the
former implies the latter).
[1. Walras]
As for "utopian", I don't see how the Walrasian framework is any more
"Utopian" than, say, Marx's Vol. I scenario of exchange at value.<
There's no comparison. The Walrasian story -- say as represented by
the late Gerard Debreu's famous and "Nobel" prize-winning THEORY OF
PRICE (oops, I meant "VALUE") -- is an extremely idealized picture of
a simple commodity-producing economy without a viable or realistic
notion of time, economic coordination, money, or production. (On
economic coordination, it implicitly assumes the existence of a
God-like Auctioneer.)
Worse, the standard orthodox economist assumes that this model is the
hidden truth that we mere mortals only see reflections of on the cave
wall, so that the world can be judged according to the model's
standards (what's called "welfare economics"). Even worse, the IMF
applies this ideology: if the world doesn't fit the model, forces it
do so. (The dominance of Walrasian theory in economics can only be
judged by what's _put into practice_. It's the IMF-World Bank-US
Treasury "Washington Consensus," which centers on Walrasian idealism.)
It must be made absolutely clear that I don't think that Gil is like
the standard orthodox economist or the IMF. No, far from it! I am sure
that he knows all about market failures (i.e., the deviations of the
real world from the Platonic ideal). However, I was talking about the
dominant ideology in orthodox economics. Even radical dissidents such
as Gil often define themselves _relative to_ that orthodoxy, nipping
at its heels rather than trying to present a full-scale alternative
(the alternative paradigm that URPE and its journal were started to
develop).
BTW, utopias are often very good, interesting, and revealing. Edward
Bellamy's LOOKING BACKWARD and William Morris' NEWS FROM NOWHERE seem
possible statist and anarcho-communist duals of Debreu's ideal market
economy.
And utopias aren't just "good places" (eutopias) but also "no places"
(outopia). The deviation between the model/ideal and the "real world"
(another redundancy!) can be very revealing. The fact that the real
world cannot live up to Debreu's ideal assumptions says a lot about
the real world, though some might say that the story of the snake and
the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden is more
meaningful.
[2. Marx]
On the other hand, Marx's method of abstraction is different (cf. the
Introduction, section 3, of the GRUNDRISSE), so his analysis of
exchange is different. He is empirically-minded, but knows the need
for abstraction. He starts with an emphasis on the shared
characteristics ("essences," if you will) of real-world phenomena.
That is, instead of starting with a bunch of axioms à la Debreu, he
starts with the real world (perceived "facts") and then abstracts from
aspects of the real world. Specifically, in CAPITAL, vol. I, he
abstracts from differences of use-value. Given this, what's left is
the social essence, i.e., the fact that commodities are produced by
labor. (He then re-introduces differences in use-value step-by-step.
The abstraction in volume I is only the beginning of a long process --
more that three volumes worth! -- of moving away from abstraction to
again encounter the real world.)
It's notable that Marx -- like most of the rest of the pre-NC poltical
economy -- never assumes idealized markets (as no-one had thought up
such an animal yet). Markets are empirical, a constantly changing
arena of fluctuating prices and quantities, with prices of production
assumed only as centers of gravitation. (And like the moon moving
toward the earth, prices need not always attain the center of
gravity.) He never assumed away
production, money, or time. (That's what all this seemingly silly
stuff about M-C-M' and the like is about. It helps us understand a lot
without using math.) He never assumed complete information.
Coordination doesn't play a big role in volume I, but his (implicit
but realistic) assumption is that it doesn't work very well: his focus
was on the economy as it is, a dynamic, chaotic, system of expanded
reproduction. (That's "chaotic" in the non-math sense of the word.)
His assumption that prices of production equal values, as noted,
represents an abstraction. For his time, it was fit with the _lingua
franca_ of political economy of his day (cf. Dilke, "Labor is the
source of all wealth and revenue," emphasis suppressed). It also
allowed a unified analysis of macroeconomics and microeconomics
(though macro really hadn't been invented as a separate field yet, so
he didn't say it this way). For Marx, it allowed a focus on defining
and understanding the social relationship between "abstract capital"
and "abstract labor" in as realistic a framework as possible, while
cutting through the fetishism of commodities that inevitably creeps in
if the heterogeneity of both capital and labor is not abstracted from.
(Of course, if you stop there, at a very high level of abstraction, it
leads to trouble. It's too bad Marx never finished his book!)
[3. a NC-style exploitation model, not!]
Nowadays, an economist might do Marx's analysis with a simple model
with two people (Crusoe and Friday) where Crusoe controls the
non-human resources (even the fish in the sea!) and the products of
his and Friday's labor. Crusoe then uses force to defend his control
over those resources and refuses to feed or clothe Friday unless the
latter produces a surplus for him. If Friday doesn't do so, he faces
unemployment, during which he won't be
able to eat (or attain his subsistence in general). I haven't seen
such a model, but it could be done (in theory). The threat of
unemployment and zero income for Friday is the main deviation from the
orthodoxy (though it has shown up in the "efficiency wage" literature,
which no longer seems fashionable these days).
Strictly speaking, the above isn't a scarcity model (and thus not a
"special case of a scarcity-based theory of value"), since the
non-scarcity of labor-power (the scarcity of jobs) is central. Central
to the story is _artificial_ or surplus scarcity, i.e., Crusoe's
forcible hogging of the non-human resources, the _imposition_ of
scarcity on Friday. (This model, like the real world, is conflictual.
Crusoe would have a hard time sleeping, because Friday might sneak in
and end his dictatorship.)
[4. conclusion]
I think I prefer Marx's non-modeling (non-idealist) approach of trying
to limit the number of abstractions. This meant that as the book
progressed he could relate the current level of abstraction to
real-world phenomena, producing all sorts of useful insights about
them.
I guess one has to do cost/benefit analysis. Debreu's assumptions
incur a tremendous cost because they are violent abstractions from
reality. Are they worth any insights about the real world that arise
from his book (relative to those of more empirically-minded
Marshallian economics, for example)? what _are_ the benefits of
Debreu's assumptions, anyway?
Marx's price = value assumption is also costly (though I think that
the quality of his prose in chapter 1 imposes a bigger cost). The
benefits would have been greater if he'd finished writing CAPITAL, but
there sure are a lot of real-world insights in volume I.
[C. Exploitation Models.]
Indeed, one can show that exploitation arises even under Walrasian
conditions....<
There are lots of exploitation theories (Robinson's monopsony theory,
monopoly theory, the free-rider theory, unequal exchange, George's
theory of land-rent, Keynes' critique of rentiers, etc.) It's best to
clarify which is the subject of the discussion.
Specifically, let's talk about the _Marxian_ theory of exploitation.
Roemer didn't show that Marxian exploitation arises under Walrasian
conditions. As Gary Dymski and my articles show, his exploitation
theory is a theory of scarcity rent (e.g., land rent) being
monopolized by a particular segment of society (like that of Henry
George or George Bernard Shaw -- or, for that matter, J.M. Keynes),
not a Marxian theory.
_Who_ has shown that Marxian exploitation can arise even under
Walrasian conditions (i.e., with full employment, no money, no
production, etc.)? Both the late John Elliott and I produced stories
(models) of Marxian exploitation in Bill Dugger's book INEQUALITY
without reference to labor-values. But neither of these were in the
scarcity paradigm as above (and neither was Walrasian), because of
the existence of involuntary unemployment in the stories. It's true
that they were developed without values (just as Marx suggested that
his exploitation story could be told using prices of production
instead of values) but it's hard to imagine either John or I doing so
without sitting on Marx's shoulders.
[D. Aside on Henry George.]
me:>> Perhaps I am here and below misrepresenting what Gil's
scarcity-driven vision is exactly. But this is only because he does
not clearly specify which scarcity-driven theory he is advocating. He
might be a follower of Henry George, for example. <<
Gil, now: > Well, geez, Jim, neither did Jon "clearly specify which
scarcity-driven theory" he was inquiring about, but I notice you
didn't take *him* to task for this when you posted your response to
his e-mail. Maybe *he's* a follower of Henry George.<
Jon didn't seem to have the agenda of reducing economics to the
scarcity paradigm. He was in effect simply asking a question: "I am
having troble deciding between two theories of value: scarcity need
and labor cost of production."
You, on the other hand, made an assertion: "'Labor cost of production'
theory is most coherently understood as a (very) special case of a
scarcity-based theory of value," which says to me that it's not really
a choice, so that Jon shouldn't have any trouble deciding.
By the way, I think Henry George was very smart (and wrote very very
well). I think economists can learn a lot from him. I don't think of
invoking him as being in any way an insult. His stuff about taxing
rents still makes a lot of sense (except in textbook caricatures). In
desperately simplistic terms, BTW, that's what Chávez is doing in
Venezuela.
[E. Definitions of Scarcity redux.]
For what it's worth, though, with just one clarification and one
caveat, everything I wrote is consistent with the semi-definition you
supplied in your own reply to Jon: a good is "scarce" if its supply
curve is not infinitely elastic at zero price. The clarification
would be to add the qualifier "at the level of current demand"--i.e.,
a good's supply curve doesn't have to be *perpetually* infinitely
elastic at zero price to render the good "unscarce." Agreed? <
I'd agree with that caveat, except that it's important (introduced
above and developed below) to distinguish between _natural_ scarcity,
which the scarcity-driven paradigm centers on, and _artificial_
scarcity, which is a deviation from the paradigm.
That is, I think I made a mistaken when I stated my "semi-definition."
A not-perpetually infinitely elastic supply curve at non-zero price is
only a _symptom_ of scarcity. But it can be a symptom of either
artificial scarcity _or_ of natural-technical scarcity. The latter
distinction is what's key. (In medicine, the same symptom can appear
due to two separate diseases, after all.)
... Consequently, if your allusion to Henry George concerned the phenomenon of
absolute scarcity, I'd say that's a subset of the issues being considered here.
But not really to the point if so, since I was focusing on the case in which
opportunity cost, rather than absolute scarcity, dictated supply price--the case
Marx was concerned with in constructing his account. <
I don't think that George was totally interested in absolute scarcity,
but that's another issue. He was developing the Ricardian theory of
rent in a radical direction.
[F. Agreement on the role of Demand.]
Gil wrote:
One way to see this is to note three significant caveats to
Michael P's reply to Brad DeLong. First, as Marx himself insists, a
necessary condition for a commodity to have value is that it have
use-value (that is, people "need" it) [Capital V.I p. 131,]. So as
Marx says, even if a commodity contains labor, it doesn't have value
if there isn't demand for it. ...<<<
me: >>That's right. Marx never denied the role of demand. In fact, his
big book starts with it: "A commodity is ... a thing that by its
properties satisfies human wants of one sort or another ... whether
they spring from the stomach or from fancy...." The old
history-of-economic-ideas view that Marx's theory of value and price
is totally "objective" is wrong.
He _does_ abstract from the specific use-value of specific
commodities soon thereafter in CAPITAL, but abstract use-value (and
thus demand) still plays a role in the theory. It then is reintroduced
step by step as the book progresses. <<
Gil: > Great, but I'm not sure how any of the above alters my original
point: according to Marx, labor embodied in a commodity is not of
itself sufficient for that commodity to have value. It must also be
demanded. Thus, just as in the neoclassical approach to scarcity,
Marx's is not *strictly* a production-side theory of value. <
I never said that it was strictly a production-side theory of value.
The only onces who think so are certain eo-Ricardian Marxists (who
emphasize the non-substitution theorems, etc.) I think
non-substitution theorems are pretty irrelevant.
Further, Marx's theory is one of artificial scarcity, not the natural
scarcity emphasized by the Walrasians. Perhaps, in theory, the Ws can
introduct artificial scarcity into their theory, but the dominant
ideology militates against that.
[G. Keynesian stuff.]
...
Gil, now:>First, this does not address my point that in *Marx's own*
perspective (which was not evidently Keynesian in nature), the
justification for labor-embodied as a basis for value is in terms of
opportunity cost and competing needs--i.e., scarcity. So at least I'm
doing no violence to Marx's labor-based approach as he conceived it. <
Since Marx was forthright in his rejection of Say's Law in ch. 3 of
vol. I of CAPITAL and because realization difficulties are central to
his incomplete analysis in vols. II and III (and because he made it
clear when he _assumed_ that Say's Law was true, ignoring realization
problems, as in the introduction to part VII of vol. I), I don't think
the rejection of Marx's Keynesianism (or rather proto-Keynesianism) is
on target.
As noted above, he had an empirical, classical, view of market
competition. Unlike (say) Debreu, he would never assume that a
competitive firm acted _as if_ it could sell all that it produced at a
given price (Clower's statement of Say's Law). All that Keynes,
Clower, and Leijonhufvud do is make some of the details of market
operations clearer (and much clearer than Debreu does). This
clarification was truly needed only by the NCs, who instinctually
assumed Say's Law, usually without knowing what they were doing,
because it's part of the Walrasian ideal.
They still do, BTW, even though they should know better. I look at
labor economics textbooks, which economists write not only to make
money or attain tenure but to represent the orthodoxy that students
"should know." All of them talk about unemployment arising from purely
micro-phenomena (sticky wages, efficiency wages, etc.) Some
bring in sub-potential aggregate demand, following Keynes, though even
fewer bring in a sales constraint that would make the beautiful
marginal product of labor graph less beautiful. None that I've seen
note the feed-back, from the normality of unemployment to the
microecomic operation of the firm. For example, the normality of
unemployment -- and a positive cost of job loss -- means that employed
workers have an incentive to act as "insiders," trying to protect
their jobs from their unemployed competitors. Instead, the NCs assume
that microeconomic firm behavior is only affected by price variables
and objective functions. The "insider" behavior is simply a matter of
workers being bad or rather engaging in inefficiency-promoting
special-interest behavior (an exogenously-imposed assumption).
Second, I don't see how the introduction of Keynesian considerations
fundamentally alters my point, since "excess supply at going wage
rates" is clearly not equivalent to "infinitely elastic supply at zero
wages". Or to put it another way, labor power doesn't stop being
scarce just because markets for labor power don't clear (just as the
value of labor power doesn't become zero just because there is excess
supply). And I'll bet neither Leijonhufvud nor Clower argue to the
contrary, whether or not the resulting situation is "Walrasian." Do
you have a citation suggesting to the contrary? <
If the normal workings of the system say that prices exceed the
scarcity-price, then a scarcity theory of prices leaves something very
important out. It means that scarcity is _notional_ (ideal) rather
than effective (in the real world), to use Clower's terms.
me: >>Further, to Marx, the dynamics of capital accumulation imply
that labor-power cannot be scarce for long. If it is scarce, this
squeezes profits, slowing accumulation and the demand for labor-power
(cf. CAPITAL, volume I, ch. 25). The reserve army of labor -- i.e.,
non-scarce labor-power -- is thus reproduced over time. Labor-power is
non-scarce in the Walrasian sense because its price (the wage) does
not equal either the marginal disutility of submitting to an
employer's authority for a specific time-period and the marginal
productivity of the capitalist's use of labor-power. ... <<
Aren't you being inconsistent with your own characterization of
"scarcity" here? The existence of an industrial reserve army doesn't
imply that the supply of labor power is infinitely elastic at zero
wages at going levels of demand. And I don't see the basis for your
suggestion that labor power is "non-scarce" because "its price...does
not equal either the marginal disutility of submitting to an
employer's authority for a specific time-period [or] the marginal
productivity of the capitalist's use of labor-power." Whose scarcity
definition is this? ...<
To me, as noted in the introduction above, scarcity would involve full
employment of resources, not just as a notional matter, but as
effective, in the real world. It's true that I wasn't clear about
this.
My implicit definition of scarcity above involves the two
(neo)classical postulates that Keynes defines in his GENERAL THEORY OF
EMPLOYMENT, INTEREST AND MONEY (using more NC terminology than I
used). In the real world, these do not apply, except once and awhile.
(Strangely, Keynes himself only rejected one of the two. This is the
normal _modus operandi_ among NCs, who like to drop only one
assumption of the Walrasian model at a time and so cling hard to the
Platonic ideal. Only one snake can be introduced into the Garden of
Eden at a time, it seems.)
To my mind, there's a big difference between wage determination in the
Walrasian story (the apotheosis of the scarcity paradigm) and that in
Walrasian disequilibrium, with an excess supply of labor-power. The
latter is more a matter of the Blanchflower/Oswald "wage curve"
(which, to its credit, is more of an empirical concept than a
theoretical one).
But rather than hassle with definitions, let's focus on what's
important. What's central here is that the role of institutional or
_artificial scarcity_ of jobs (an artificial abundance of
labor-power), so that wages are kept in line with the needs of capital
as part of the normal workings of the system. If labor starts becoming
scarce, the rates of surplus-value and profit fall (as macro
phenomena), slowing accumulation and restoring non-scarce labor-power.
This rests in the capitalist control of the institutions of our
economy (what I've called capitalist "supremacy" in Dugger's book),
just like Crusoe's hogging of the means of subsistence and production
in the story above.
me: >> Third, right before the quote above, Marx says "Every child
knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us
say, just for a few weeks, would perish." This is not in tune with the
scarcity-driven paradigm. <<
Sure it is, it's just an extreme version of the implications of
scarcity. If there literally were no scarcity, then no one's survival
would depend on the allocation of labor.<
It's not "scarcity" if it's imposed by a mass strike. This would be
artifical scarcity of a new sort, a reaction to (and thus completion
of) the normal one-sided class war.
The idea of "literally no scarcity" is a red herring. My point before
is as it's now: scarcity doesn't _rule_. It just plays a role in the
background. Class relations (including artificial scarcity) and the
like _rule_.
...
me: >> Even ignoring this societal element, Marx is referring not to
the microeconomic kinds of issues that drive the scarcity vision.
Instead, it's a macroeconomic phenomenon -- "any nation that stopped
working," with "the mass of products" being a notion akin to that of
GDP. <<
See above, but even if I granted this it wouldn't contradict my point. You found
a sentence where, on hypothesis, Marx wasn't talking about scarcity. So what? I
cited a passage where he was (see next comment). <
the two sentences are complementary. But at this point, I'm going to
impose an ellipsis rather than defending my outrageous statement. If
find arguments over the meaning of quotations to be even more tedious
and unproductive (to coin a word!) than those over the meaning of
words. If Gil wants to conclude that he won this part of the debate,
so be it.
[H. A little bit of quotation-mongering.]
Marx's statement above gives away quite a lot to a scarcity-based
conception of value, but even so it is based on some very restrictive
assumptions, in particular 1) that the "total labor of society" is
given ... and thus invariant to relative prices; <<<
me: >>In terms of his CAPITAL, volume I, Marx's discussion is of
_abstract_ labor (and thus abstract labor-power). <<
Perhaps, but I wasn't citing CAPITAL, I was citing Marx's ex post justification of
his labor-based value theory in CAPITAL. That justification stands whether or not
Marx was discussing abstract labor, since that is simply an aspect of the theory
thus justified. <
I think that Marx's work is best represented by CAPITAL, with friendly
letters to Kugelman or Krugman or whomever being extremely weak
sources. His discussion in his letters is hardly as serious as his
masterwork was. (It's like the footnote in CAPITAL where Marx
justifies his historical materialism by saying something like "people
under feudalism couldn't eat religion." It's not a serious argument.
Though it does suggest a good T-shirt slogan.)
The true justification fo the "labor-based value theory" is not
scarcity, as far as I can tell, but the fact that labor is the _social
essence_ of the economic segment of society, one that's hidden by
commodity fetishism. (It's in volume I, chapter 1 of CAPITAL.) Marx's
theory is an _institutional_ theory of value, in which prices are
determined by the institutions (rather than simply natural scarcity).
To understand capitalism as an institution, he uses the "labor theory
of value."
...
[I. An Aside on Behavioral/experimental economics.]
Some day, neoclassical theory will also drop its silly assumption
that wants (preference sets) are given exogenously. Unfortunately,
even experimental/behavioral economics doesn't seem to want to deal
with endogenous tastes. It smacks of the dreaded sociology, which
everyone knows is inherently fuzzy and unscientific and therefore
anathema. (Economists want to forget that economics is nothing but a
type of sociology.) <<
This inaccurate diatribe against mainstream experimental/behavioral [B/E]
economics is in any case not relevant to my argument. <
This was not a diatribe. Look up the word "diatribe": it's a "bitter,
abusive denunciation" or a "thunderous verbal attack." I am not
thundering, nor am I "bitter." If I were bitter, how would you know?
Also, I wasn't abusing, denouncing, or thundering.
In any event, what I wrote was a description of fact: the standard
model of economics takes tastes as given (clinging to methodological
individualism rather than learning from sociology). B/E economics does
not break with this (as was obvious from the seminars I've been to and
the books I've read). Nonetheless, it's a major step forward, among
other things undermining the whole _homo economicus_ model. That's why
I don't "denounce" it.
Or is it that any kind of critical thinking about establishmentarian
economics is _by definition_ shrill, thundering, diatribing? If so,
times have definitely changed.
I think I'll stop here, for now. Unlike last Thursday, I have too much work.
--
Jim Devine / "The decadent international but individualistic
capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is
not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not
just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn't deliver the goods." -- John
Maynard Keynes.
