Eugene Coyle quoted: >> (Thaler urges his students to master the same traditional, mathematical models their colleagues do if they want to be taken seriously.)
Julio Huato wrote: > It's solid advice to students of the social sciences to master the > "same traditional" (i.e. the existing) mathematical models of the > economy. That's premise of any serious critique of economics. It's > not only for others to take you seriously. It's for us to take > ourselves seriously. I agree that's important to know the official (orthodox) version of economics, including the math. We can actually learn from it. That's because the official economics isn't totally wrong. It represents an _incomplete_ vision of the economy, suffering from commodity fetishism (a.k.a., the illusions caused by capitalist competition). This means that the totality -- the class nature of production and of the economy as a whole -- is usually missed. However, sometimes these models say something about the operations of pieces of the totality. Modern oligopoly models, for example, say much more than Marx's idea that profit rates tend to equalize between sectors (unless blocked). In fact, Paul Sweezy contributed a major idea to oligopoly theory (the kinky demand curve model). -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
