Mirowski and critiques

[GALBRAITH.JAMES@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Gintis, Nilsson and Toruno are wet blankets, in my collegial opinion. None
would lift a pen to defend the pure formalisms of general equilibrium theory,
of the style of Arrow-Debreu or Samuelson's Foundations. But faced with a
a truly original critique -- I refer specifically to "more Heat than Light"
-- they moan that they have heard too many critiques and want something
constructive for a change! Declining to engage the particulars of mirowski's
arguement, we hear instead that the "physics analogy is overdone," with the
implication that mirowski contributed little to our knowledge and perhaps
doesn't deserve to be read, let alone discussed in our enlightened circle.

I say, give me mirowski over this bunch, any day. In my view, Phil's book
contributes something quite specific and original to the general perception
that neoclassical economics is derivative from physics, namely a fairly
precisepinpointing of the specific physical formalisms from which Walras
cribbed his system. Second, he contributes something highly original to the
critique, namely the incoherence of the cognate of the conservation of energy.
Third, and perhaps most important (as Roy Weintraub observes in the De
marchi volume) he overturns the whole existing basis of the history of
economic thought, which before Phil's book proceeded almost uniformly on
the assumption that economics developed in a channel of its own, that one
could study the subject without knowing the influences of Newton, Darwin,
Lagrange and Hamilton.

Personally, I find Phil's work an illuminating way to introduce diverse
currentin modern economics to advanced students, one that preserves their
abililty to analyze from diverse perspectives and their openness to
alternative, and possibly more coherent, formalisms. I challenge his
detractors to come up with other examples of truly heterodox work -- and
by that I mean work that thoroughly escapes the orbit of the
neoclassical equilibrium framework, in a way that much of the American
radical tradition simply does not, incidentally (HG, for his many merits,
is an example) -- for which one can say half as much.