======================================================================
Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
======================================================================
Looking Back for Insights into a New Paradigm
by Mark Lindley and James Farmelant
It is becoming widely acknowledged that the leading ideas of some
of the most prestigious late-20th-century economists (such as Alan
Greenspan and Lawrence Summers in the American government) are
outmoded and that a new paradigm of economics is needed. Part I
of this essay will focus on two issues which we think it has to
address and will cite some passages in which great economists of
the last 250 years have called attention to them: the inadequacy
of the "economic man" concept in microeconomics and of
"closed-system" models in macroeconomics (i.e. models taking
account of social exchanges only, to the exclusion of material
exchanges between humankind and the rest of nature). Part II will
begin with a brief consideration of (a) the traditional metaphor
(in Western writings) of the benign "invisible hand" and (b) some
related aspects of the work of the most renowned economist of the
first half of the 20th century, John Maynard Keynes, and of a
brilliant contemporary of his at the University of Chicago; then
it will shift, via a critical assessment of a statement posted
recently by Keynes' most knowledgeable biographer, to a statement
of what seems to us to be the main challenge facing 21st-century
economics. Part III will be about some past and present
ideological excesses which 21st-century economists -- and
politicians -- ought to avoid.
full: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/lf170811.html
________________________________________________
Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu
Set your options at:
http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
