Solow on class

Sam Pawlett epawlett at uniserve.com
Sat Jan 23 12:21:09 PST 1999


Doug Henwood wrote:


> Henry C.K. Liu wrote:
>
> >I would like to hear your reaction to the NYTime article as a professional.
>
> I'm not a professional economist. I took 5 semesters of undergraduate
> economics. I do read a fair amount of the economics literature, but
> decidedly from the outside. My impression is that the discipline is
> technically elegant and intellectually bankrupt, completely lost in a
> specific kind of largely empty theorizing, lurching between irrelevance and
> apologetics. It's completely divorced from the rest of intellectual life -
> politics, psychology, sociology, history, culture, all of it. (Some
> feminist economists are an exception to this rule, I should say.) Uchitelle
> touches on some of this in his article, but he's still too kind, which is
> what you might expect from a New York Times reporter. I'm with Jim
> O'Connor, who says that economics is a criminal enterprise.
>
> Doug

There is some interesting work being done by neoclassical economists. My old micro teacher, Greg Dow, has done a lot of work on the micro theory of worker owned firms. William Lazonick wrote an interesting book about industrial organization utilizing some neoclassical theory. J. Vanek wrote some interesting books on market socialism. There is also a book on power relations whose author and title escapes me. Of course, there's Roemer, Elster et. al. the marxists everyone loves to hate. As for Tootsie Mccloskey, I would say, from what I've read, that some of her work is quite interesting. From "Some Consequences of a Conjective Economics" by Donald McCloskey: " The notion that one can prove a great social truth by standing at a blackboard is a peculiarly masculine delusion. The women can do the math, of course. But they are less inclined to accept it as all there is. It is something of which women students of economics are disproportionately skeptical., I think, though usually silent in their skepticism. Men,especially young men, are typically able to believe any crazy abstraction about society, and stand ready to impose it by forc of arms because they do not know what a "society" is. Many more women know, even when young, and are appalled by the shallow summaries of society displayed in the words and graphs and mathematics of economics...Economics through feminine eyes would not lack seriousness or rigor, unless the women economists allow the feminine to be defined as marginal, pushing Virginia Woolf, Joan Robinson, Emily Dickinson and Margaret Reid of to one side in favor of Serious Work." _Beyond Economic Man. Feminist Theory and Economics_ ed. Ferber and Nelson p78ff.

Sam Pawlett



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