Re: Alfred Marshall -reply

["RICHARD P.F. HOLT" <holtri@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I agree with Charley when he says Marshall "has an evolutionary air but not
the essence of evolution" as defined by Veblen. In regard to Joan Robinson
and historical time. Joan, in my opinion, articulated very well the
importance of historical time but this came later in her thinking. In
her earlier writings you simply see the use of logical analysis in her
analysis of equilibrium. I believe that Marshall should receive more
credit than he does in recognizing the importance of time and the evolution
of things, but he does approach evolutionary change in an ambiguous fashion.
In many ways, I believe that Marshall's economics suffered the same fate
as Keynes did with the introduction of the IS-LM framework. Economists
have a very bad habit of taking great and complex ideas and try to boil
them down to some type of model that looks like this:

Exogenous variables  ------>   MODEL -------> Endogenous variables

Time for a change?

-Ric Holt
e-mail: holtri!vax1.elon.edu