Duesenberry

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Mat writes:>By the way, I had the chance to meet Duesenberry a couple years
ago at the New School and I introduced him to some people and mentioned that
he was the innovator of the relative income hypothesis.  He said that Edward
Chamberlain wrote on monopolistic competition and never did anything else
after that and he did not want to be thought of in that way at all--he had
no interest in discussing the relative income hypothesis.<

BTW, the fate of Duesenberry's relative income hypothesis is a clear sign of
the ideological slant of modern orthodox economics. Even though the RIH does
as well empirically as its competitors and represents the results of just as
serious scholarship (if not more so), its role has been minimized in the
textbooks (if not omitted altogether).

Why? because the modern orthodox Mandarinate insists -- as a matter of faith
-- that people _must_ be seen as atomistic rational planners with
exogenously-given preferences. Bringing in sociological or
social-psychological matters is seen as violating the purity of the
establishment truth, while undermining the economist's faith that he or she
is superior to those damn sociologists.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine