With regard to this question of "revolutions," I think
that the one where there may be a political element is
the continuing undervaluation of catastrophe theory.
Chaos theory and complexity theory are much more
easily house-broken ideologically, so to speak. After
all, there is a right-wing, Austrian-derived, complexity
theory, how free markets are self-organizing and all
that, which actually dates back to Hayek himself.
A curious aspect of how the hyping and dehyping
can distort analysis shows up in the analysis of the
1987 stock market crash. This occurred near the
peak of the chaos theory intellectual bubble, but
well after the crash (and overshoot in my view) of
the catastrophe theory bubble. Everything was to
explained by chaos theory, nothing by catastrophe
theory. So, you had all kinds of chickens running
around with their head cut off clucking about how
the stock market crash proved the existence of the
"butterfly effect" (or sensitive dependence on
initial conditions) of chaos theory, when it did no
such thing.
In fact, although nobody of any prominence mentioned
it at the time, the 1974 paper in the Journal of Mathematical
Economics by E.Christopher Zeeman, vol. 1, pp. 39-44,
"On the Unstable Behavior of the Stock Exchanges," had
much more to say about what happened in 1987 than did
any chaos theory model. It was the first paper on cat
theory in econ and was one that had been subjected to
truly idiotic critiques in the late 1970s. Today its value
is well understood and it is frequently cited in the current
complexity, heterogeneous agents, econophysics kinds
of stuff that is now becoming almost standard to explain
what the hell is going on in stock markets.
But, I think the "more revolutionary" tailings coming out
of catastrophe theory are one not so obvious reason why
it remains out of bounds to most economists.
Barkley Rosser
