Present an alternative: Sydney J. Chapman's 1909 theory of the hours of labour
Not so much an alternative as a corrective to what has been a long, strange detour for neoclassical economics. While it is true that the Walras/Edgeworth/Pareto paradigm emerged in the 19th century, it only became cemented as the dominant sect of NCE after the 1930s under the tutelage of the likes of Robbins, Samuelson, Hicks and Bergson. Eventually Hicks himself became appalled at how the Hicksian appropriation of Walras came to be used as justification for all kinds of ungrounded "mathematical" razzle-dazzle. It so happens that the detour required the discreet setting aside of certain principles that had been convincingly demonstrated in Chapman's theory. Both Robbins and Hicks explicitly acknowledged the importance and authority of those principles before they set off on their respective "thought experiments." Their well qualified counterfactual "we know X is the case but for the time being and for the sake of convenience we will assume otherwise..." somehow became subsequently simplified as "we all know not-X is the case..." I wrote a paper about this that I presented last June in Amsterdam. Because Chapman's article was published there, I submitted it to the Economic Journal, where it was summarily rejected. Being a grocery store clerk rather than an academic, I haven't had the time or the inclination to shop it around to other journals. If anyone is interested, I can send it to you in a MS Word file. On 4/7/08, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > This is much too abstract. If people want to talk about the inadequacy > of NCE (as they should!), they must present an alternative. It's not > enough to trash a theory, even if one's criticisms are totally valid, > if the alternative is the null set, intellectual anarchy, crude > empiricism, scholasticism, or religion. > -- Sandwichman _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
