Re: Mirowski and critiques

["Dr. Denise H. Johnson" <JOHNSON@xxxxxxxx>]

A conservation law is applicable to partial differential equations, and
yields quantities that remain invariant during the evolution of the
partial differential equation.  Given an evolution equation, which is
a partial differential equation, a conservation law is a partial
differential equation of a particular form which is satisfied by all
solutions of the evolution equation.  Mirowski is not the first nor
last to speak of conservation laws in economic models, for example,
take a look at CONSERVATION LAWS AND SYMMETRIES:  APPLICATIONS TO
ECONOMICS AND FINANCE by Sato and Ramachandran (1990) or earlier
works of Samuelson (1970), Weitzman (1976), and Sato (1981, 1982) to
name a few.  Examples of conservation laws in economics include
conservation of income growth (Samuelson, 1990), conservation of
capital-output (Samuelson, 1990), and the conservation of pseudo-
net-productivity relation (Sato, 1990).  Certainly there are more.
Most of these economic conservation laws arise from the assumptions
of the von Neumann, Ramsey, and neoclassical growth models.  Typically
the number of conservation laws derived in these models ranges from
one to a few; however, a model found in a dissertation by Johnson
(1993, UMass/Amherst) has an infinite number of conservation laws and
associated symmetries.
Denise Johnson

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