1. John Vertegaal 30-May-07 at 8:45 am

    Dear Ms. McCloskey,

    Since you put the dates: 1964-2000 in the text, you may no longer view the mainstream’s “means and ends” approach to reality as being helpful. The question I have however, is: if it can be shown to be as unscientific as say creationism, does it still deserve equal billing?

    There are several ways to demonstrate the mainstream’s depiction of reality as feigned, but perhaps the most concise one is to point out the vacuity of its foundation.

    If one places all confidence in the means to be able to determine ends, shouldn’t it be requisite to define the “stuff” the means consists of? What, in terms of some basic axioms, is indeed capital and/or money? If countless investigations into the matter have lead nowhere, except in the uncovering of a bunch of paradoxes, is that not proof in itself that whatever axioms neoclassicism may be based on, they are erroneous? And if we are to take the word of economists of the “social engineering” ilk you talk about in the student’s preface, that they “know” what capital is, is that any different than believing in astrologers who know the influential forces of the planets?

    To my way of thinking, there is only one way to put the “means and ends” controversy into perspective, and that is by turning it upside down; i.e. letting the ends determine the means, while prior to that considering (the value of) the means to be indeterminate.

    Sincerely,
    John Vertegaal

  2. Deirdre McCloskey 31-May-07 at 10:46 am

    Dear Mr. Vertegaal:

    I quite agree. Economics needs to become again, as it was in Adam Smith, an ethical science. I just wrote a book saying this, called The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce. That doesn’t mean throwing math and demand curves and market entry and exit into the trash can. It means taking ethics beyond Max U seriously. Amartya Sen started this.

    But as I’ve said to some others, I don’t think that theorems can prove the errors of neoclassical economics (to which I still adhere, inside its limitations). Amartya, who spent the first half of his caeer on the blackboard, agrees. It’s not a matter of theorems, but a matter of historical facts, right up to the present. The blackboard is not where a social science should spend its life. We can’t do with philosophical tricks what can only be done with factual, scientific inquiry.

    Sincerely,

    Deirdre McCloskey

  3. Jorge Ibarra 13-Jun-07 at 12:42 pm

    Dear Professors Klamer, McCloskey and Ziliak,

    I’m not happy with the expression “people’s choice” to refer to what is produced, how it is produced, etc. because it denotes that economic outcomes are the sum of the free exercise of individual options that are already there, as in a menu. It lacks historical perspective, hides the true existence of economic actors with different capabilities to effect economic outcomes and also leads to an extreme simplification of what a market really is, in all its complexity, which I think is one of the main deficiencies of mainstream principles books. I rather prefer the social systems or social circumstances approach to begin an introduction to economics. On that basis the study of economics can elaborate, in the explanations of the separate contexts, about where choice really applies, along with the contexts where the exercise of power and initiative effect economic outcomes. That is, although individual choice should be considered, it has to be treated as a constrained subset of a broader social order made of differentiated social actors, and not the beginning of all economic activity. That’s a different start to the study of economics.

    Congratulations on your initiative.

    Jorge Ibarra
    Universidad Nacional Autonòma de Mèxico

  4. Deirdre McCloskey 14-Jun-07 at 10:58 am

    Dear Dr. Ibarra:

    I understand your worries. We agree with your point, and have made it at length in our own writings—for instance my book The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006). You put it very well. I am reminded of a book I have recently discovered, Alan Page Fiske’s Structures of Social Life: The Four Elementary Forms of Human Relations (1991), which has persuaded me that we need to start with socially embedding for markets—I was almost entirely persuaded when I read it.

    What needs to happen is to see just how the “constrained subset of a broader social order” challenges conventional Samuelsonian economics in its home. I know you will agree that some of our effort needs to go into showing in detail how Becker and the like go wrong, factually, in quantitatively substantial ways when they ignore the structure of social life.

    Sincerely,

    Deirdre McCloskey

  5. Orlando Roncesvalles 27-Jan-09 at 10:21 pm

    I noticed a simple typo in the part on the history of thought and mercantilists (the sentence on Mun that ends “instead of simple disdaining it.” Unless already fixed, you meant to say “instead of simply disdaining it.”

    No need to post this comment.

  6. Orlando Roncesvalles 27-Jan-09 at 10:33 pm

    Dear Professors Klamer, McCloskey and Ziliak,

    On how to define economics, I myself lecture on this by referring to a definition attributed to Stigler — that it deals with institutions for solving the “economic problem” (what you call the what, how, for whom question). I also like Coase’s overbroad definition (“study of human choice”) in his Essays on Economics and Economists. Incidentally, the market/nonmarket distinction in his 1937 paper on the firm is a fundamental contribution in my view, meriting him on your list of “greatest economists.” Just some thoughts for your consideration.

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