Carrol Cox wrote: > If I remember correctly, someplace in _Capital_ there is a footnote... that > defines "vulgar economists" and lists there functions, apologetics being the > core. Things have not improved since then have they?<
In CAPITAL, Marx defines "vulgar economy" in a footnote: >Once for all I may here state, that by classical Political Economy, I >understand that economy which, since the time of W. Petty, has investigated >the real relations of production in bourgeois society in contradistinction to >vulgar economy, which deals with appearances only, ruminates without ceasing >on the materials long since provided by scientific economy, and there seeks >plausible explanations of the most obtrusive phenomena, for bourgeois daily >use, but for the rest, confines itself to systematising in a pedantic way, and >proclaiming for everlasting truths, the trite ideas held by the >self-complacent bourgeoisie with regard to their own world, to them the best >of all possible worlds.< >(http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4 n. 33) IMHO, this describes most of the dominant neoclassical school of economics (e.g., my hero Mankiw). But some academic economists such as J.M. Keynes get beyond the superficialities of vulgar economy. The usual method of neoclassicals is totally microeconomic, looking at the world from the perspective of the self-complacent bourgeois. Keynes veered toward a more macroeconomic perspective (while being very critical of one section of the capitalists, the rentiers). Since he wrote, his theory has been largely neutered. -- Jim Devine / "In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness." -- George Bernard Shaw _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
