Re: Duesenberry

[Eugene Coyle <eugenecoyle@xxxxxxx>]

It is curious how little notice Duesnberry's book is given.  For mine, it
destroys the whole neo-classical analysis once and for all.  (One of many such
destructions that have had no discernible result.)  I wonder if Duesenberry
would rather distance himself from its implications than fall, be pushed,
outside the pale.

Gene Coyle

"Devine, James" wrote:

> 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