The best way to reinforce a dogma is to oppose it with other dogma. Why do all the critics assume that the mathematical foundations of neoclassic economics are solid, only the assumptions are not?
Why don’t you give a try to a different approach?

Yours

Paulo Casaca

s marglin is at harvard and wrote ‘what do bosses do’ (which i think—or maybe it was bowles and ginits) asked whether it was logically consistant to say employees actually employed the boss rather than the reverse. (just as one might say dogs actually own their owners, but don’t let on who is the server rather than served). logically, from the outside, often one cannot really where the power is, and its orientation. (‘everywhere people are born free, but then adopt wearing chains’.)

there are some progressive types around, but people like feldstein (who seems pretty scummy) and others of that style (who often write the texts)are much more vocal and invited to DC.

one can also mention that some fariyl mainstream neoclassical / GET models actually dont really support policies favored by ‘elites’ which maximize inequality and explain it based on per capita productivity.
many standard economists are in favor of higher minimum wages (eg card and krueger); even samuelson later on regretted ‘free trade’ policies based on an interpretation of his work. Thurow’s model of income distribuition like many others sees it resulting not from optimization but chance and ’statistical discrimination’ (as did H Simon’s). I dont class those people as radical—-and the theories are reasonable to me.

i mention this partly to ‘not throw the baby with the bathwater’. i actually think the standard theory can be used against the status quo, though how much its worth trouble is open. Alot of this stuff is ideological. People like Feldstein or Friedman really have agendas; but one can use the same theory (or computer or equation) with different agendas beyond serving power.

(also my own view is the only real difference between marxism and capitalism is semantic—-marx sees ‘exploitation’ and that its bad and leads to bad; capitalism just says that is ‘factor endowment’ and the net result is optimal or pareto efficientd(just as they argue there is no such thing as ‘involuntary unemployment’. I see these as inverses (1 times 1 = -1 times -1.)

from an ‘equations’ approach (avoiding vague terms like exploitation) the standard general equailibrium model (which i take to be essentially classical, before you do a real macro type approach with production functions, etc.) has ‘zero profit’ at equilibrium, and that point says nothing about distribution. If one assumes identical utility functions, then everyone will be equal. In a way, that might be closer to Adam Smith’s point of view, because its pure barter and people basically trade at labor cost.)

the alternative radical approaches of self-management logically are quite conceivable—and there are quite a few around, but in reality, even a food co-op, can be hard to collectively manage. humans also often basically feel content with authority, and just doing what they are told, since its conveniant in some ways. (what H Simon called ’satisficing’—-good if not perfect. tradition preserves the status quo. and ignorance can be bliss too, or at least reality TV.)

http://tinyurl.com/y885gea

My pleasure. Spread the word to others who might be interested.

Jim,

At lunch one day at Harry and Beadie Magdoff’s apartment in NYC, Paul Sweezy commented on William Vickrey’s Nobel award in economics. While Paul thought well of Vickrey, who was in Washington with Sweezy during the New Deal, he said that the work for which Vickrey won the prize (work that laid the basis for things like peak hour pricing for parking in cities) was “trivial.” He fairly spit out the word. Poor Vickrey was planning to try to do some good, a la Krugman and Stiglitz, but he died not long after getting the prize.

Samuelson devoted no little time trying to debunk Marx, without success I might add. Meanwhile he also tried to defend his US colleagues in the famous Cambridge controversies in the theory of capital. Somehow Marx was not scientific but his “surrogate production function” was.

Michael Yates