Breaking away from animal husbandry with my sheep, I am tempted to defend Los Angeles against the dire slander that it is New York (the so-called "Big" Apple) that is the world center of sarcasm and irony rather than the City of the Angels. But instead, a couple comments on Roemer. First, I want to praise Louis Proyect for his useful trashing of Roemer. It's not the kind of thing that would get published in an academic journal, but it's quite appropriate to pen-l. Second, I must admit that I tried to read the Roemer book that Louis surveys, after Barkley sent me a copy for review. I had to send it back, unreviewed, because it was too boring -- and too far off from my own research -- to read. But I did note something. Awhile back, Roemer developed his "general theory of exploitation." Gary Dymski and I published critiques of his models of capitalist exploitation, a short one in the REVIEW OF RADICAL POLITICAL ECONOMICS (1989) and a long run in ECONOMICS AND PHILOSOPHY (1991). If I were forced to summarize our critique in a sentence, it is that even though Roemer's a good mathematician and logician, he's a poor economist. (For example, his models are unstable when treated as an actual description of the way an economy works: exploitation for him is based on the scarcity of means of production, but he never explains that scarcity; in fact, scarcity creates the incentive to accumulate, which abolishes the scarcity -- and the exploitation.) Anyway, I don't consider his response to Gary and my articles to very serious except that he conceded we were right on a point or two. He never even mentions our critique in EGALITARIAN PERSPECTIVES, even though he reproduces some articles there that we criticized. (He also doesn't mention Gary Dymski and John Elliott's trenchant critique.) But as far as I can tell, our criticism simply encouraged him to retreat further from descriptive economics (and from Marxism) to dwell in the utopian neverland of normative economics. To some extent, people like Roemer (and Gintis) go off the deep end because people on the left are intolerant of strange opinions and attitudes. (BTW, the same intolerance is common on the right and in the middle.) But I think that both got swept up in the self-image of the economics professors as math-wielding scientists who are better than other mortals. in pen-l solidarity, Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Econ. Dept., Loyola Marymount Univ. 7900 Loyola Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90045-8410 USA 310/338-2948 (daytime, during workweek); FAX: 310/338-1950 "It takes a busload of faith to get by." -- Lou Reed.
