Solow on class

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU
Sat Jan 23 11:31:42 PST 1999



>From Paul Mattick Jr's Social Knowledge (ME Sharpe, 1986):

"...we must explain the material success of economic theory, given its scientific failure. A factor that springs to mind is the apparent success obtained by Keynesian economics during the 1950s and 60s in mananging the business cycle. But not only did this success turn to stagflationary ashes in the mounths of its pundits; more significant is the fact that throughout the heyday of deficit financing neo classical economics continued to be taught and accepted as an integral part of economic science, despite the proof of its own inadequacy presented by the Great Depression, which had launached an earlier 'crisis of economic theory.' The situation, indeed, is reminiscent of nothing so much as the disinterest of the Azande in exploring and resolving the contradictions in their account of witchcraft... "if economic categories play as central a role in the definition of capitalist social relationships as witcraft categories do in the life of the Azande, it is not hard to understand the resistence of this network of concepts to the effects of theoretical incoherence and empirical disconfirmation. What drew Marx's attention to political economy as an object of critical analysis was the combination of its theoretical inadequacy and its dominion over professional intellectual and ordinary thinking alike. He was thus faced with the same problem as Evans Pritchard: the explanation of a conceptual scheme that is functionally indispensable to the life of a culture despite its inconsistencies and absurdities."

rb



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