never said that. In fact I said it’s probably worth checking out.

“What do people think about the Wikipedia article on General Equilibrium?”

It’s a bit schizo. You can see the different contributor’s different styles and biases.

I’m working on an analysis of “intellectual rent”, which is what professional monopolies collect by virtue of their monopoly. For example, they can equivocate about the problems with GE.

More than one author in the Collander book comments on the very slow (decades-long) way in which important theoretical changes and new results filter down to the teaching/ textbook level. This is very odd indeed, because economics is one of the disciplines where students are milked the most efficiently with new textbook editions every two or three years. There are various reasons for this kind of inertia, but ideology (I don’t mean that in a technical sense) is probably one of them.

I haven’t cited anyone from the other book, since it’s been declared here already that those authors not worth bothering with.

I still thin that you should read both books, but whatever.

My own animus against economics comes from the fact that whenever I run into a hard-core, bloddthirst, social- Darwinist free-marketer, he invariably has studied economics and believes in it as gospel. I do also run into liberals and moderates, but I don’t get the feeling that the center of balance of the profession is there, and the liberals and moderates seem unwilling to break solidarity with their profession. By and large I think that the political effect of mass teaching of economics has been highly negative.

I don’t know the article so this is commentin’ in the dark, but strictly speaking there isn’t anything in ge that “is not true”. Given certain assumptions certain results obtain. Then you get to argue about how strong/meaningful assumptions are.

Also even at the grad level, usually you get two or three core micro courses and there’s a lot (200+ years!) of material to cover. Usually ge is one out of these three courses – which generally is not enough time to go into the subtleties, many of which are very messy.

And anyway, a very large portion of economics these days is empirical work and at least I get a sense that theory, and disputes over theory have taken a back seat to obtainin’ better data, using better estimation methods and dealing with real world data problems.

That’s why I’d prefer that undergraduates get an understanding of opportunity cost and similar basic concepts, rather than being presented with a set of policy prejudices they can neither defend nor refute, which is the effect of being taught GE badly.

Well, general equilibrium, true or not, really isn’t taught except at grad level since there’s no way around many technically hard issues (and all the interesting controversies over whether it is ‘true’ (‘useful’ would be a better criteria) are even more technical). Well, I guess you might see an Edgeworth Box as an undergrad but even then it’s very very watered down.

What does get taught in some macro, is a representative agent type stuff that is supposed to be general equilibrium (but there’s a butt load of assumptions behind it). But from my experience most undergrad macro sticks to Keynesian IS-LM stuff.

Even in the Collander book, which is moderately dissident or heterodox, there’s a sort of circle-the-wagon insistence on being “mainstream” but not “neo-classical”. Though if there’s no such thing as a neoclassical economist, of course none of you are neoclassical.

One of the points of the Collander collection, and even more so the other one, is that regardless of how open-minded and adventuresome the top guys at the top schools are, it takes decades for new ideas to filter down to the average and below-average schools, with the result that large numbers of miseducated economists are pumped out into the body politic to do their dirt.

And what Gintis says is that the majority of students learn GE without any reservations. Gintis does not believe that the limitations of GE should be an esoteric secret to be revealed only to upper-level students. He thinks that things that are not true should not be taught.

I’ll have to read the Colander book, to see exactly what Gintis is saying. No-one sensible thinks that the strong results of GE theory hold in reality, though there’s a big range of dispute about how far off they are. This is pretty much the theoretical basis for most disputes within economics between interventionists and free-market types. If Gintis is saying that, despite this, lots of students get taught the strong claims of GE theory, without the qualifications, and that this is a bad thing, I agree. If he’s saying that GE theory shouldn’t be taught at all, I disagree.

I’ve read Mirowski’s book and didn’t get a lot out of it. He has a fair point about “physics envy”, but it was more applicable 50 years ago than today, and even so he goes way over the top with it.