I read the article also. Although I am not an economist, I was also influenced by Heilbroner. In fact, when I was teaching urban planning at UCLA in the late 60's, we regularly invited Heilbroner, who loved to rub shoulders with planners, for lectures and seminars.
The following part of the NYTime piece especially evokes some personal thoughts:
"In the process, economists also squeezed out the word capitalism, the once traditional name for the market system, with its subjective connotation of class struggle between owners or managers and workers and with its suggestion of the privileges that go with various levels of wealth. The word capitalism no longer appears in popular textbooks for Economics 101. Explaining why, N. Gregory Mankiw, a 40-year-old Harvard economist and author of a popular new textbook, "Principles of Economics," said: "We make a distinction now between positive or descriptive statements that are scientifically verifiable and normative statements that reflect values and judgments.
The question is, can you do positive economics without normative economics. I think so."
It reminds me of the time I proposed to do a "normative plan" for Los Angeles, and was challenged that it was a socialist approach. The challenge was only neutralized when I discovered that an economist at Rand was working on a normative plan for the California economy, focusing on the transfer of military technology to the civilian sector. Rand and SDC were crawling with normative defense planners.
It appeared to me than a positive or descriptive understanding of social systems is purposeful only if there is an implied purpose to improve on the existing. I was particularly impatient with "positive" researchers who would then then claim existing conditions to be "real" and "visionary objectives" to be "unreal". To me, existing conditions are merely failed visions, both being equally real in the perception sense. I remember another impression I have that. at least up to the 60s, British and European economist tended to be philosophers while the American economists that I knew or whose work I was reading were mechanics, onsumed with operational aspects of quantitative analysis, so much so that one cannot carry on an overview conversation with them unless one is deeply involved in their specific, narrow and esoteric specialization. I would like to hear your reaction to the NYTime article as a professional.
Henry
Doug Henwood wrote:
> from an article in today's New York Times on the dismal state of the dismal
> science
> <http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/arts/heilbroner-economists.html>:
>
> <quote>
> [Robert] Solow, however, is a pillar of mainstream economics. His economic
> growth theory, in which he explained the interactions of capital, labor and
> technology in generating economic expansion, is a model of economics
> practiced as a science. He would never, he said, "advise a student to go to
> work on the nature of the class structure."
>
> "You are condemning him to failure," he continued. "We do not know if there
> are applicable rules."
> </quote>
>
> Doug