>Rob, did you ever read any of Stiglitz' academic work? It's almost
>all math. As far as I can tell, though the math is impenetrable to
>me, he's not saying much that couldn't be said in ordinary prose, but
>you can't be sanctified as a theorist in economics these days without
>speaking in equations.
Nope. Never will. But when he addresses the great unwashed, as he did on the occasion of that World Bank piece of his (the one that apparently got him sent to Coventry), he did a remarkably good job of pitching it at that mythical 'intelligent layperson' at whom we were once all taught to pitch our public utterances. I reckon critical theorists, with their avowed focus on their role within a potentially transformational collective (one that needs but confrontation with hidden truths about its plight and its capacity to do something about it), have been pretty ordinary at getting their pitch right (hence comrade van Heusden's reservations about his estwhile Seth Effriken mates). I mean, I can't imagine PLOP lifting the fog for an alienated 14-year-old lesbian in Brixton, or a battered gay bloke in Arkansas. It's simply not aimed at the avowed critical theorist's constituency, in my view (but then, that's critical theory for ya - I shouldn't be picking out poor Judith; she's working within an entrenched tradition of elitist wankers, I reckon - the pity of it is that a lot of 'em have been so very clever).
>Michael Perelman told me that he ran into
>Stiglitz at a conference once and mentioned that Ricardo stated the
>theory of adverse selection - one of the things for which Stiglitz is
>famous - in ordinary prose 200 years ago, and Stiglitz was surprised
>to hear this.
Well, Smith (and Ricardo only insofar as a simplistic appeal to his comparative advantage thesis has been used to justify closing down manufacturing throughout first-world economies) is used as a legitimising icon rather than a theoretical context, I reckon. My suspicion is most on this pinko list o' uneconomised reprobates have read more Smith than the vast majority of his avowed professional 'followers'. The self-interest of the butcher and the baker sometimes gets a tendentious mention, but that's the only bit of WoN that ever gets a geurnsey in popular economic debate around these parts. And his Theory of Moral Sentiments (the book of which he himself was most proud), well, they've never heard of it.
Not 'scientific', I s'pose ...
Cheers, Rob.