Re: Heterodoxers are crackpots

["Gunnar Tomasson" <gunnar.tomasson@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Re. the following:

 

>The important thing that Roy Weintraub's book indicates is getting enough axioms to make a general theory that can be applied to real world phenomena. 

 

Comment:

 

As indicated in my earlier post on the role of "deductive logic" in economics - and let me not put too fine a point on it - it is asinine to imagine that "real world" economic "phenomena" can be reduced to a set of axiomatic postulates.

 

Gunnar

 

 

----- Original Message -----

From: Paul Davidson

To: pkt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Sent: Monday, August 26, 2002 10:51 PM

Subject: Fwd: RE: Heterodoxers are crackpots

Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2002 22:49:59 -0400
To: "Forstater, Mathew" <forstaterm@xxxxxxxx>
From: Paul Davidson <pdavidson@xxxxxxx>
Subject: RE: Heterodoxers are crackpots

At 03:18 PM 8/26/2002 -0500, you wrote:

If the theory with the fewest axioms is automatically the best, then mine wins; it has zero axioms.

 

 I did not say it was the best I said it was the most general.  The important thing that Roy Weintraub's book indicates is getting enough axioms to make a general theory that can be applied to real world phenomena.  The trouble with the Debreu model is it is conceived of as "general" by th mainstream -- and Keynes as a special case where wages (and/or prices are assumed fixed the added assumption) -- but it can be shown by Keynes in the GT, that his theory does not require fixity of wages and prices nor the axioms of ergodicity (or the ordering axiom) and neutral money -- the latter are two axioms required by Debreu's general analysis

I am working on one that has negative axioms.

Hey there are some people out there that have already beaten you to this goal --)! e.g., historians?

paul

Paul Davidson

Editor, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics

503 SMC

University of Tennessee

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