On 8/29/06, Mark Lause <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Fads are just fads in any academic area. They aren't designed to get people thinking in any ways different enough to threaten the existing paradigm.
I didn't say that they were _designed_ to get people to think different (as Apple Computer puts it). Rather, they are tolerated because they keep the pot boiling, among other things allowing the Young Jerks to challenge the Old Guard, etc. Sometimes these do challenge the existing paradigm, as when Keynesian economics arose. But the true challenge comes from the outside -- i.e., the Great Depression, the inability of existing economics to handle it, and the social unrest associated with it -- and the Young Jerks ride the surf produced by it (along with the inevitable fall of the Old Guard into senility and death). When the Depression faded from memory, the Keynesian wave washed back to sea, and Keynesianism became absorbed into the orthodoxy. -- Jim Devine / "Self-exhaustion in war has killed more states than any foreign assailant." -- BH Liddell Hart.
