Dear All,

Although I am not qualified to comment on the pros and cons of the Solow
and Radner cases, and though I would not necessarily make claims as strong
as those made by Moss about the motivations of economists, I think there
_are_ cases where the popularity of published work in economics says more
about its compatibility with existing theory than about its "truth". Two
examples spring to mind:

1) Friedman argues in his famous 1953 book that profit maximising does not
need to be justified empirically (luckily under the circumstances!) because
firms that do not profit maximise will "die out" under an evolutionary
argument. There are a number of papers, below are only a sample, refuting
(or at least challenging) this view effectively, which are very rarely
cited:

Chiappori, Pierre-Andre (1984) 'Se/lection Naturelle et Rationalite/
Absolue des Entreprises', Revue E/conomique, 35(1), January, pp. 87-108.

Hodgson, Geoffrey M. (1991b) 'Economic Evolution: Intervention Contra
Pangloss', Journal of Economic Issues, 25(2), June, pp. 519-533.

Hodgson, Geoffrey M. (1994) 'Optimisation and Evolution: Winter's Critique
of Friedman Revisited', Cambridge Journal of Economics, 18(4), August, pp.
413-430.

Winter, Sidney G. (1964) 'Economic 'Natural Selection' and the Theory of
the Firm', Yale Economic Essays, 4(1), Spring, pp. 225-272.

Witt, Ulrich and Perske, Joachim (1982) SMS - A Program Package for
Simulating and Gaming of Stochastic Market Processes and Learning
Behaviour, Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems 202 (Berlin:
Springer-Verlag).

2) Why is so much attention paid to modelling development rather than
research, risk rather than uncertainty, individual rather that social
utility functions? Not I suspect because these cases are uninteresting or
unimportant (and I have never seen this argued), but because they don't fit
the theory well. Unfortunately, unlike cases where a known result is
ignored, it is much harder to explain why certain areas of research tend
not to get onto the agenda in the first place. (This as Steven Lukes points
out in his book on power, this is a far more effective way of controlling
something than trying to suppress it ...)

As a final thought, it would be interesting to do a straw poll on the
number of times that people in the different disciplines are told that a
problem is "not interesting" or "not real economics/sociology/economics".
My highly anecdotal experience suggests that this form of social control is
far more prevalent in economics that elsewhere ...

ATB,

Edmund Chattoe