Re: Marshall on Nature and Economy

[GONZALO FONSECA <FONSECA@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Barkley Rosser writes:  "Thus as [Marshall] is both the father of fatuous
neoclassicism at its didactically most trivial and mechanical, combined
with otiose continuous Darwinianism.  At the same time he is
biological/evolutionary, dynamically nonlinear and highly complex, with
multiple equilibria and  foreshadowings of path dependence along with
other stuff.   But much of this was in prefaces, footnotes, and
appendices."
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Precisely.  For all of Marshall's welcome conjectures on evolution and
historical time,  he did not make much use of them in the body of his
analysis as such.  His "positive" contributions to economics remain
largely within a very mechanical (and very incoherent) framework.

Gonzalo Fonseca
New School for Social Research