Re: Article in the Chronicle of Higher Education

[pdavidso <pdavidso@xxxxxxx>]

>===== Original Message From "J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." <rosserjb@xxxxxxx> =====
>      I agree with Paul Davidson regarding the
>use of math and rigor.  Arguing against math
>and rigor, per se, just leads to heterodox
>economics being marginalized and disregarded.

Not quite what I said Barkley. I said that the heterodox attack on math and
rigor makes it easy to marginalize and disregard serious heterodox thinkers!

>      I also agree that Roy Weintraub's book is
>very interesting, although I have some disagreements
>with him (but those will be aired in the JPKE
>Symposium to which Paul referred).

With a rejoinder from Roy Weintraub.

>      I would note that although math and rigor must
>be accepted, there is a trend to having less of it
>in the mainstream now to a small extent.  Even in
>places like JET or J. Math Econ one now sees
>long verbal introductions that attempt to explain
>in words what is supposedly going on in the paper.

All that means it takes more printed pages to reach the same neoclassical
garbage conclusion!


>      However, I disagree with Paul regarding
>pluralism.  That must be the appropriate response.

Let me be clear what I am suggesting regarding pluralism.  What I am
suggesting is that there is a funamental basic general theory (genbneral since
it rtequires less fundamental axiomatic building blocks than any other theory
of an entrepreneurial economy.  Then we can build "special cases" of this
general theory by adding additional axioms on top of the fundemental ones. [So
classical economics is a "special case" of the Keynes's G.T]

Explicitly specifying the additional axioms  underlying one's theory permits
pluralism -- but it also permits the fair-minded reader to see why the
different theories differ due to which additional assumptions are built into
each different (plualistic) theory.

Thus, for example, Marxian economics becomes a special case of the special
case classical theory---where axioms about power (instead of competition) are
added to the classical ergodic assumption and the long-run neutrality of money
axiom.

And Austrian economics as well as bounded rationality and game theory [and I
could add multiple equilibrium macroeconomic theory, and the Summers
-DeLong-Stiglitz-Tobin theory of financial markets], despite their emphasis on
the decision maker making decisions either under [epistomological]uncertainty
or in the case of noise traders ignorance about the underlying ergodic
stochastic process], are all pluralistic special cases of classical theory
that, in turn. is a special case of the general theory.

And the classical special case, as Keynes points out in the first page of the
GT, possesses additional postulates [axioms] that are applicable only to the
special case and "the characteristics of the [classical] special case...happen
not to be thoseof the economic society in which we live, with the result that
its teaching is misleading and disasterous if we attempt to apply it to the
facts of experience."

paul

Paul Davidson
Editor, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics
University of Tennessee
SMC 503
Knoxville, Tennessee 37996-0550
phone # (561)369-1951; fax #(561)369-1951;
email pdavidson@xxxxxxx
http://econ.bus.utk.edu/davidsonextra/Davidson.html