"Hear then, o Economidae, nymphs of the streams Of infinitely discussed yet discounted prophets, Of the story which I sing: the epic of men And women locked in the battle of egos and coherence, Precision and relevance, the song for all ages And peoples to hear and revere the great and poor Deeds of this tribe of malcontents and heroes..."
In the beginning there was mercantilism. Then God created Adam
Smith. Some would argue that the first being was in fact
French - a Quesnay or a Cantillon to be precise - and your humble
storyteller would certainly lean towards such an interpretation.
But the consensus of our elders (those rotten English dogs) tells
us that, instead, economics began with Adam's creation.
But to begin our story like this is already to court trouble.
You see, dear reader, Adam Smith contained in him elements of
both the Hebrew and the Greek deities. The Hebraic aspect of
Adam spoke of judgement and "moral sentiments". But the Hellenic
side told stories of the magical "invisible hand" of the gods,
with virtue self-defined and judgement suspended. The parables
Adam subsequently bequeathed upon his progeny only left them
bewildered in this respect.
Paradoxically, it was a Jew that settled this dispute by putting
the car firmly on Greek rather than Hebraic rails: the
magnificent - again this account is gathered from the stories of
the elders (the same rotten English dogs) - a more Gallic
interpretation would have bestowed these laurels on the brow of
Jean-Baptiste Say.
Nonetheless, your meek storyteller must proceed with the story.
Concordant with his Apollonic demeanor, David Ricardo was entirely Hellenic in
his economic vision: his individuals were mostly passive, the
puny playthings of the objective gods of history and structure.
Yet, as Euripides of Hellas, Ricardo of London did have his
Orestreian heroes: the persecuted entrepreneurs, fighting against
the furies of diminishing marginal returns to land - only to be
saved occasionally by the graceful hands of the enlightened
priestesses of free trade and technological change. But the
petty and vengeful gods looked upon these humans as haughty and
verily regarded their haughtiness with disdain. Disguised as
landlords, the gods stealthily walked among the heroes and cast
plagues and misery upon them. Inexorably, sang Ricardo, no
matter how brave or
bold the capitalist heroes might be, the gods were destined to
win in the end.
Thus was born the
Thomas Malthus, tried to paint something of a moral story in
it, but the dismal Ricardian canon won out - particularly when
enshrined in the McCullochian Elegies and the even more famous
Millian Hymns.
But all was soon not well in the Classical realm. Behind them, a
flock of avenging Eumenides, such horribly named as Thornton,
Longfield and Senior, cast their
disequilibrating curses upon the
Ricardian poets. Whereas across the wide channel, under the
volcanoes of barbarous lands, the cyclops Cournot, Gossen and von
Thunen forged in silent sweat the subjective weapons which were
to be given to the murderers of the gods. But even before the
Hellenic Ricardians had grasped event the breadth of their
challengers, a lonely Roman, an usurping Caesar arose in their
midst.
The Classical system was Latinized by Karlus
Marxius. Informed by Hegelius' chronicles of Teutonic
mythology, he wrote a new theogony - reinterpreting the history
of the gods and how they were born and lived and died and were
replaced by new races of gods - for, indeed, in Marxius' theory,
everything in this world was so full of contradictions that even
the immortal gods were mortal. At several points, Marxius
changed the names of some gods and gave others characters
different than those in the original Hellenic version as set out,
for instance, in the Millian Hymns.
Marxius's theogony seemed more fit for the more violent and
militant times of the advanced industrial age. In Marxius's
hands, the genteel Hellenic Classicism of Ricardo and Mill was
replaced with more visceral Latin elements: the biting language
and rhetoric reminiscent of a Juvenal or Horace - combined with
the political oratory and visions of a Cato or Cicero, the
idealism of a Varro- Ricardo had appeared as a gentlemanly
Apollo, Marxius came forth as a virulent, bearded Mars.
Marxius's contributions to the Classical Canon were themselves
found in a long ruminating summation of the logic of capital, in
short, a "Summa Capitalogica". There, he provided a very
detailed and comprehensive analysis in the Classical vein. His
use of Ricardian metres was obvious and his conclusions were
astounding. For instance, in Marxius' theogony, the gods were
even more merciless to the cursed House of Capital: a special
place was reserved for them in Tartarus where, like Tantalus,
they were endowed with a raging thirst for profit and then placed
in the middle of the ever-receding Lake of Falling Profit Rate.
But, perhaps following the steps of Paracelsus, Marxius's search
for the Elixir of the Transformation Problem proved to be a
vexing difficulty - and far from being life-giving, this search
only served to drive him and his works to their grave.
By the time of Marxius' "Summa Capitalogica", the Classical Canon
was in its death throes. The agents of Ricardian economics, many
had concluded, were too passive to be deemed a suitable
construct; the determination of prices and outputs, which is
ostensibly a human affair, and the fate of economic activity was
still in the hands of the gods of objective structures.
Throughout Europe, many Olympian demi-gods, haunted by the
cursing shrieks of so many Eumenides, were themselves growing
increasingly restless.
In the year 1871 (or was it 1874?), three young Prometheans, the
romantic bohemian Leon Walras of
Lausanne, the rebellious and
revolted William Stanley Jevons of
Manchester and the tortured
daydreamer Carl Menger of Vienna were
secretly armed by the
cyclops. Leaping on their marginally winged mechanical steeds,
the three riders stormed up from earth, broke through the gates
of Olympus, dethroned the gods and proclaimed the ascendancy of a
new age: the rule of subjective value theory - where humans, not
history nor gods, would determine the course of events.
Yes, dear reader, it was to be the rule of man over the world -
for with an almost existentialist flavor (occasionally laced with
mathematics), the element of individual "choices" interacting
with each other became the prime and sole determinant of the
system rather than the inexorable fancies of the objective gods.
Economically speaking, then, Heidegger overthrew Hegel in 1871.
Then the big brothers came in. With the same practical, cold-
blooded assiduousness that characterized Robespierre after
Desmoullins, the brutally pragmatic Alfred Marshall and his minions laid
their hands on the revolution and thwarted its entire meaning.Ô
textbooks - where the old objective supply curves were imposed on
the new subjective demand curves regardless of ideological
purity. Under their rule, the revolution was institutionalized,
professionalized, sanitized and, in many ways, defanged. Indeed,
to confuse the populace as to its origin and essence, it was
called by the blasphemous and meaningless term "Neoclassical".
Some rebels such as the furious, sardonic Vilfredo Pareto, the
deranged, wild-eyed Knut Wicksell and
the brilliant youngster and
Homeric scholar, Philip Wicksteed,
maintained something of the
original flavor of the Promethean revolution in their speeches,
but they were exiled to the ends of the economic world, chained
and gagged by unhelpful editors and hostile university
committees. The usurper, Alfred Marshall, founded a new dynasty
that was to rule economics for a very, very long time.
Paradoxically, the Marshallian Hussars set out to silence the
dissidents (or continentals, as they were sometimes called) were
sometimes accompanied by something of a devil: a mouse-looking
sort of reluctant captain with an even stranger name, Francis Ysidro Edgeworth. With his
eccentric passion for long words, statistical equations and
recontracting, he was verily a true son of Albion. Yet his
apparent treachery was a function of his modesty: for such a
humble man, who had once crafted mathematical and conceptual
thunderbolts to lend to the revolutionaries, had later decided to
step back into the shades so as to not be part of the coalition
that might block the light away from the Cantabrigian monarch.
A less troubling case was that of another promising young
Promethean, named Irving Fisher of New
Haven. Every once in a
while, he added his Promethean fire to the Walrasian flame, but
he oftentimes extinguished himself with excess supplies of paper
money. Although often invoked, we must note that he did not
serve in the Marshallian regiments (indeed, he was a pacifist)
and quietly went on to invent new indexing systems for merchants,
new diets for the rich and new genes for the poor.
Yet around the Alpine mountains where no rotten English dogs bark
and the air is pristine and filled with utility (but no
opportunity cost), where water is more scarce than diamonds,
where time is so subjective it seems to fly by in an instant, an
Epicurean group had gathered around old Menger to chant the
magical words of yet another Dutch Jew of Portuguese descent:
"The primary and sole foundation of virtue or of the proper
conduct of life is to seek our own profit". These words of
Baruch Spinoza, from many suitably discounted centuries before,
entranced the young Tyroleans. Little Eugen, Friedrich,Ludwig,
Fritz, Josef and other irreducibly uncertain boys locked
themselves in the ministries and seminar rooms of the Austrian capital and dreamed of following
the style of the eternal Spinoza and so build an
axiomatic-deductive edifice to explain the ways of markets to
men.
The Anglo-Saxon fingers also slipped from the throats of tree-Ô
home of that Promethean demon, Knut Wicksell - who would bow to
no king (not even the Swedish one) and taught his students well
in the art of economics and poorly in the art of professional
advancement. He brought unto the Vikings not the tepid tomes of
England but rather the prayerbooks of the Austrians and the
mathbooks of Lausanne. Bravely, upon these texts, Wicksell built
even greater and insightful edifices.
Long after Wicksell had gone before the Lords of Valhalla to
argue his innovative ideas about money circulation,
capital-structure and, uh, turning convents into
profit-maximizing ventures, his visionary legacy proceeded in the
hands of his remarkably able students. Sadly, these were
nonetheless ignored by most rotten English dogs and indeed, the
whole country suddenly disappeared from the economist's atlas -
until, years later, some of these students and their friends in
high places decided to create a memorial prize to remind the
world that Sweden was still there. If only, dear reader, they
could remind us of how exciting and innovative it once was as
well!
The Olympians too were not eliminated altogether by the
inquisitional bands of Marshallian Hussars. Some Olympians lived
on secretly - such as Sraffa, Kalecki and Leontief - occasionally
interacting with the new regime, at other times just living as
hermits, safely hidden from the mortal professional scythe of
Neoclassicism. There, they continued to clandestinely measure
things in quarters of corn, bales of wheat and tons of iron, and
would deliberately forget to add utility-based demand functions
to their big systems of equations. Around their hermitage, they
told us, diamonds were not scarcer than water - they were simply
costlier to produce.
One group of Olympians disguised themselves as their old enemies
(the Titan "Historicists") and called themselves Institutionalists. But these also
lived a famished existence in small communities scattered over
the barbarian wastelands of America and Germany. Some concluded
that as long as they were allowed to work in peace on their tasks
(hammering mountains of figures into solidly-crafted business
cycles, for instance), they would not seek to provoke the wrath
of the new regime. But some demon-inspired, such as one named Veblen, heeded not the danger.
Disregarding their precarious position, they laughed at and spat
upon the boots of the Royal Hussars and their "revolution". But
the latter branded these brave souls as insane and mercilessly
executed them on the spot.
But despite their apparent absolute power, the Bourbon kings of
Cambridge should not have thought themselves so comfortable. A
great migration was soon to upset the partial equilibrium they
had set up. For lo, upon the horizon, scores of de-laureled
mathematicians and economists that had been locked in isolation
in Vienna and other areas of Europe fled from brutally real
Prussian oppression during the 1930s and made their way to London
and the United States - making these lands havens of stirring
dissident activity.
In America, dear reader, in a shining moment reminiscent of the
earlier revolutionary fervor of 1871, some of these foreign
anarchists and their young American allies, braving royalist
bullets at the barricades in the streets of Chicago, set up the
Cowles Commune and the coals of the Revolution, long smoldering,
were once again inflamed.
Across the Atlantic, over the previously impervious shores of
Albion, a similar group of infiltrators with suspicious-sounding
names and probably funnier habits emerged at the L.S.E.. The few
red-blooded Anglo-Saxons that remained in these places, such as
the young John Hicks, had nonetheless
read so much German, Italian, Mathematics and Swedish that they
no longer spoke English and had probably also lost some of their
native habits (such as Marshallian "common sense"). So too, it
is has been correspondingly revealed, of the even younger
American squire, Paul Samuelson.
Oh, Economidae, restrain the language of this humble storyteller
who does not merit the favor of your reasoned truth. He wishes
to sing with tongue inflamed of the grand concepts and dreams of
General Equilibrium Theory, of the fires ignited by the Hungarian
princes, John von Neumann and Abraham Wald, and fuelled by the
beautiful constructions of the grand master sculptors - Kenneth
Arrow, Gerard Debreu, Lionel McKenzie and so many others -
that
raged through London and America. But this unworthy storyteller
shall restrain himself for he is drunk on the aesthetic beauty of
axiomatic precision. Still, noble reader, he must go on and
report the times and verily he will attempt it.
The times indeed were revolutionary. Subversive portraits of
Walras, Pareto and Wicksteed were hung in lecture halls while the
objectivist supply-siders were strung up by the neck on the
boulevards of incoherence. Pamphlets and monographs full of
linear homogenous functions were printed by the Cowles Commune and spread about the
world. The mathematical tricolor, after almost seventy years of
neglect, was once again hung from the windows of universities
everywhere. Exiles came from as far as France, Japan and Romania
to the new Walrasian heaven, placed the fixpointedÔ kakutani
around it. Rolling up their sleeves and whistling the
Lausannaise, they set themselves to work building the new utopia
of General Equilibrium.
But the peculiar success of the Cowles Communists (and the
L.S.E.) was overshadowed by a highly important palace coup in the
royal capital. The charismatic Marshallian general, John Maynard Keynes, organized a
tight-knit circus of renegade young officers from the elite
Cambridge barracks. Urged on by an entire population
impoverished by so many years of the royalist Depression, General
Keynes and his circus were overcome by a sudden propensity to
act: letting their animal spirits take over, their coup was
quickly carried through under the shadows of night.
General Keynes overthrew and beheaded King Marshall's weak son
and heir, Prince Pigou. The royal ministers were quickly
converted into their service, acknowledging indeed the truth that
was contained in the General's Theory. The monarchy was
abolished and replaced with a republic - with citizen Keynes
himself as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth.
Oh, the republic was challenged from the first day - but vainly!
Sir Dennis, forced to save the old regime, came galloping out to
face the Lord Protector. But Keynes pilloried him straight back
to his wonderland. Several Vikings stormed the shores - claiming
the land was owned by them ex ante. But, after a financial
arrangement, they soon set sail back to Sweden (it is still
unknown whether they survived the return journey). All over the
country, speedily but with some difficulty, the pockets of
defiance that still remained were diminished or overwhelmed
altogether. The Keynesian republic was in place.
Yet there were always the exceptions. The mad baron Friedrich
von Hayek, indisposed towards all rulers, whether Olympian,
royalist or republican, fled to the Alpine lands, where perched
atop Mount Pelerin, he would sing sad dirges to the moon and
delirious elegies to the dawn. In these and later years, at the
feet of similar mountains across the world, the solitary haunting
wails of other lonely souls, such as Frank,
the Black Knight, Schumpter the
Sage, the passionate sorceror Maurice
Allais, Sir Kenneth of Boulder,
the heathen al-Schackle the Uncertain and, lest we forget, the
ever- suffering St. Georgescu of
Roegen, would also be heard. Like the mad baron Hayek, each
of their caps, it seemed, wore a folly of a different color.
Hounded by the Walrasians out of Micro and expunged from Macro by
the Keynesians, the royalists lived on a meager existence in the
slums of Chicago and Manchester. Many years passed and the
strangeÔ A tense modus vivendi had apparently been arranged
between these two groups and a rapproachment was even spoken of
by some young idealists. But the world prospered and continued
steadily, so no clash seemed imminent.
Yet, many years later, on a murky morning - and oh, dear reader,
it was to be a dark day indeed - two footloose barbarian knights
made their way down from the frosty North. The heathen (and
doubtlessly savage) knights, Clower the Constrained and Axel the
Lionhead, proceeded to the duomvir and brazenly accused the
Walrasians of irrelevance and their Keynesian brides of
faithlessness. The entire country held its breath: surely, this
dishonorable insult could not stand unanswered!
Finally, the Frankish Emperor Edmond, whom had been trained in
the visionary arts by the solitary sorcerer Maurice and apprenticed at the Cowles
Commune, took up the barbarians' gauntlet. Edmond set forth with
his Paladins to meet the challengers. The brave Paladins, which
included Benassy of Gaul, Dreze of the Belgians and Grandmont the
Ephemeral, returned with all manners of treaties and boons.
However, your storyteller must note that among the brave Paladins
was a knight as wily as Ganelon of old - who, later seduced by
net wealth, was to become known as Barro the
Traitor. Still, the
barbarians had provoked the Keynesians and Walrasians to finally
confront one another and settle their differences through some
rationing process. Alas, there was an ensuing failure in
coordination and the stability of the duomvir system was
endangered.
In the meantime, there were other troubles outside the gates.
From the royalist nest of counter-revolutionaries in Chicago,
occasional monetarist cocktails
were cast at the institutions of the new Keynesian republic.
However, besides causing some tremors in public opinion, they
were of little consequence. Nonetheless, the tumult sealed the
name of one royalist firebrand, Bonnie Prince Friedman, in the popular lore and
newspapers of the hinterlands.
Still, the New England Cuirassiers swept about the land and
contained the royalist terrorists. The Cuirassiers, led by
Colonels Tobin, Samuelson, Solow and
Modigliani, fancied themselves defenders of the Keynesian
republic, and were often compared to the "Roundheads" of yore.
But they were also called "Bastards" by others - therefore we
shall take the linear combination of these two terms and
henceforth label them "Blockheads".
Despite their successes against royalist pockets, the Blockheads
suffered substantial losses in two isolated but bloody
encounters: the Battle of Causality and the Battle of Phillips'
Curve. There, Bonnie Prince Friedman had mastered the ancient
art of the Midwestern Charge - whereby the royalist ranks,
abandoning allÔ evidence and, frenzied and wild, waving naturally
employed battleaxes and a steady quantity of broad swords of
gold, would rain down upon the carefully-knit and rigorously
built New England ranks. However impressively and coherently the
defensive lineswere arrayed by the brave
Colonel Tobin and his lieutenants, the ferocity of the
Midwestern Charge left many of the defenders reeling.
But new things were astir elsewhere. Some of the veterans in the
Keynesian army grumbled at the leniency of the rulers - arguing
that the government the Lord Protector Keynes had installed was
allowing for too much royalist influence. Why, they claimed,
even the Blockheads seemed to be fraternizing with the very enemy
they were supposed to pursue!
The veterans, Rosa Robinson, Karl
Kaldor and a small group of other radicals, inspired by the
subversive pamphlets of some old Olympian god-in-exile, attempted
a Sraffacist putsch in the heart of the Keynesian Capital. The
revolt was directed at the mercenary regiments of the Keynesian
republic - royalists who had put on Keynesian colors and were now
serving in Blockhead ranks.
As the first shots were fired across the streets of Cambridge,
the battle was enjoined. The elite of the Blockhead cavalry
raced forth to engage the Sraffacists. But cannonballs of
heterogeneous capital from behind the Sraffacist barricades
scattered the Cuirassiers. Colonel Samuelson arrived and they
regrouped and charged once more, but the blazing cannons manned
by a Sraffacist corps of Italian mercenaries foiled the
Blockheads once again.
The Blockheads then tried a Trojan Horse approach © sending forth
surrogate production functions against the barricade walls, but
the Sraffacists were not fooled and sent it back covered in
explosive jelly.
For a while the War of the Cambridges seemed almost set to
reverse the tide of history. The wearied Blockheads offered a
truce, but prodded by their initial successes, the Sraffacists
pushed on.
In the meantime, from behind the Blockhead cavalry lines, a
renegade regiment of the Pennsylvania Rifles led by Lieutenant
Weintraub, split away from the main
force and started firing from
sniper posts on their old comrades. These sniper post Keynesians
quickly signed a non-aggression pact with the Sraffacists and
formed the "Trieste Alliance", dedicated to cleansing the
republic of royalist infiltrators and preserve the ideals and
memory of their beloved Lord Protector Keynes.
But the Sraffacist revolt misfired for several reasons. For one,
there was constant bickering among different groups within the
camp - especially among the two largest factions at the heart of
the Trieste Alliance: the American Post Keynesians and the
Cambridge Sraffacists. Two other related sects which had joined
the fray -Ô their own. Secondly, they argued, politics and
numbers were against them: the Blockheads apparently used their
influence in the republican parliament to ban the members of the
Trieste Alliance to preach on street©corners and lecture halls.
Thirdly, in the heat of the battle, the Sraffacists took hold of
some peaceful Walrasian civilians (whom they mistook as
royalists) and tried to set fire to their humble communal homes.
Alas, with the assistance of the renegade Cantabrigian, Frank Hahn,the Walrasians stood not by
while their edifices burned unjustly: they struck back by
charging the Cambridge stronghold waving torches burning with
intertemporal fires and vectors of heterogeneous bullets as they
chanted "Liberte! Inegalite! Rarete!" (apparently, the first for
profit rates, the second for price©cost equations and the third
for the whole © but that is just the interpretation of this
humble storyteller who was hidden behind several barrels of jelly
as the counter©attack was initiated).
Perhaps one other cause of the failure of the revolt was that it
was quickly overshadowed by another - an Eighteenth de Brumaire
by the royalists. The Keynesian regime had became tired and
heavy with old tenured bureaucrats - and thus the inevitable
corruption and inefficiency which always accompanies this spread
like a pestilence. The Paladin challenges, the royalist
terrorism emanating from Chicago and the Cambridge Wars had begun
to stretch the resources and resilience of its defenders. To
crown their ill- fortunes, Saracen buccaneers, aboard petrol
tankers, had taken to raiding the treasuries of the local
princes, leaving inflation and unemployment in their wake. The
populace, which was already distrustful of the reliability of the
Blockheads, grew impatient.
In the royalist ghetto of Chicago, perceiving the strains and
weaknesses in Blockhead ranks, the young
Marquis de Lucas came up
with a brilliant plot which would put an end to the Keynesian
regime. Surreptitiously disguised as Walrasians (whom, it must
be recalled, the Blockheads tolerated), a royalist band led by
the Marquis made its way into the republican parliament and blew
up a ton of RE gunpowder. The old Keynesian delegates were not
all instantly killed, but they lay there wounded and dying.
Quickly enough, the Marquis de Lucas suspended the Keynesian
Constitution and crowned himself Emperor of the Macro. He
handwrote another constitution and proclaimed the dawn of a new
classical age to the confused populace. They quickly elected
their representative agents to a new parliament and all
generations, old and young, were sworn to obedience. Even those
of the loyal opposition who presumably would seek to maintain the
policies of the old regime, the so called "New Keynesian Party",
swore to theorize according to the new Lucasian Code.
With the old Keynesians killed, the Trieste Alliance scattered,
the Northern barbarians and the Paladins safely exiled in the
duchies of Ucla, Belgium and France, the Imperial Lucasian regime
seemedÔ the commissioning of numerous new public engineering
projects (under the RBC agency set up in the early 1980s) which
employed many idle and bright youngsters eager to demonstrate
their econometric skills.
It is true that the old Walrasian commune was quick to take arms
against the usurpers. But the Walrasians did not have the heart
or energy to pursue this more effectively. In the early 1970s,
after the Stability Scandal and the embarrassing Sonnenschein
Affair, the commune began dissipating as its members realized
that their utopian ideals could not be fulfilled. The early
successful days of their Existentialist Proof and the Core
Project were now over and few among them could foresee any more
promising avenues. Some Walrasian fire was still generated
during the Great Leap to Finiteness in the later half of the
decade, but the halcyon days were over. The slogans embroidered
on the mathematical tricolor, "Objective, Constraint,
Equilibrium", had proved to be an illusion and, purists as they
were, the commune was gradually disbanded.
What the new Imperial regime did not notice (and certainly did
not anticipate), however, was the slow gathering of the impending
clouds of doom. After the disbanding of the Walrasian communes,
some of its puritanical members had gone underground and formed a
secret society called Game Theory.
These, in turn, were joined
underground by old dissidents and disaffected members of the new
parliament who had grown tired of the edicts of the Emperor's
junta. Several of these secret societies were given cover by
foreign powers, such as Biology, Mathematics and Psychology, and
some of the rebel groups had even set up guerilla camps in these
lands. Under the very nose of the Imperial Guards, a Grand Armee
of dissidents was being assembled and preparations for an
invasion of the Lucasian Empire were being made.
Oh, virtuous reader, your humble storyteller has indeed seen the
Grand Armee. Once, when wandering lost through the dark, strange
Land of Journals, his Walrasian heart sad, his Keynesian bones
exhausted and his Olympian eyes much diminished, he decided to
rest upon a hill and await the lifting of the evening mist. And
when it arose, what a spectacle unfolded! Your storyteller
swears upon all the gods and more that all that is to follow, bar
some demon's interference, is what he verily saw.
He spotted a valley wherein were arrayed hundreds of armed men,
encamped, sharpening their swords and pikes and cleaning their
muskets. Like the great army assembled by Gustavus Adolphus of
old in the plains of Saxony, many different flags flew everywhere
over the camp of the Grand Armee - and, to the immense joy of
this old spirit, they were all tinged with mathematical colors.
And institutions and structures - realistic structures - were
imprintedÔ determination, a determination to save their
discipline from the cold grip of Imperial rot. Their stance,
strong and brave, as if to say "no more unforgivable assumptions,
no more shoddy reasoning, no more ambiguity and ideological
quibbling."
But, ah, patient reader of this story, it may seem that your weak
storyteller has let his imagination take his senses prisoner.
Let him then merely make his report truthfully and soberly of
what he saw in the valley: there were men and women of all lands,
speaking many different tongues, arranged by banner colors into
separate corners of the camp. This reserve army of the
disaffected seems to have been gathered and arranged into
battalions and regiments - of which your storyteller read some of
their names: Non-linearists, Bounded Rationalists,
Evolutionarists, Complexians, Sunspotistes, Post Keynesians,
Institutionalists and a rascally group of eclectic adventurers
calling themselves the Post-Walrasians. Then there were the Game
Theory battalions and their elite regiment of dragoons, the
Evolutionary Game Theorists. And there were many others, whose
banners were undecipherable but are sure to emerge forth in time.
What a beautiful sight to behold! A hundred flowers blooming
forth in this hidden Bohemian valley!
More importantly, gracious reader, when the excitement of initial
encounter wore down, your storyteller noticed there was a strange
fragrance that lurked in the camp, above the pungent air filled
with cannon smoke and gun ash: it was the scent of a purpose, a
new revolution, a smell which reminded your old storyteller of
the one of 1871 - to rebuild economics from the ground up, but
with newer concepts, axioms and more realistic assumptions and
structures.
There stood the Grand Armee of tomorrow. Armed with biological
weapons, psychological weapons and ('tis rumored) even nuclear
weapons given to them by foreign powers, they have been
practicing for the invasion of the mainland in conference camps
everywhere from Stockholm to Santa Fe.
Indeed, some have already mobilized and made deep inroads. The
Game Theory battalions, for instance, have reportedly acquired a
beachhead and swept some areas (such as Industrial Organization)
clean of imperial troops. Massive technological improvements in
the legionnaire's weaponry, notably in computing, has only
accelerated their advance. The nimble cavalries of Evolutionary
Game Theorists and Bounded Rationalists have moved far ahead and
are already holding the citadels of agent-based, rationality and
uncertainty theories under siege.
Others, such as the Non-Linearists have concentrated on a
terrorist campaign - infiltrating highly-populated areas such as
Real Business Cycle theory and detonating high-explosive
non-linear devices in the middle of it, causing immense damage
and confusion. (this is particularly troubling since the
time-consuming and grant- gobbling calibration efforts of the
Imperial Engineers of the RBC are extremely delicate and
sensitive to such sabotage). Ô whence emerged a dark realization:
the main thing lacking in this Grand Armee is the philosopher and
general, Gustavus Adolphus himself - the fire-breathing visionary
who can identify the single uniting concept and set up the
research program accordingly.
The straightforward one of "overthrowing the Imperial Court" is
simply not enough. As the sad experience of the Trieste Alliance
testifies, the objective has to be couched in positive terms of a
conceptual revolution as opposed to the negative one of just
"anti-Imperialism". Nor is the sentiment of "anti-Imperialism"
necessarily uniform across this band of armed men and women:
indeed, it is rumored that some of the elite of the Court, such
as the Sargent of the Imperial Guards
(like Wallenstein of old), are fraternizing with the rebel army.
Why, it is even whispered that Emperor Lucas himself desires to
approach them to negotiate terms of surrender.
In the end, then gentle reader, there may be no outright
1871-type revolution - although there is the hint of one
certainly in the air. Dissatisfaction runs deep and the invading
forces already in place are not going to retreat any time soon.
Yet perhaps the non- linearists will run out of bombs, or the
complexists might blow themselves up while tinkering with their
stockpile of biological weaponry, and perhaps the slivers of
Keynesians left will perish in eternal exile. And, of course,
there is still that great possibility of a battle between the
ranks of the Grand Armee.
No Gustavus Adolphus has emerged yet, so the field is open to all
aspiring lieutenants. But a Gustavus Adolphus might never arise.
Or he might come as an usurper, as Marshall did in 1890, to drag
the discipline into the dungeons of incoherence and irrelevance
for another century.
So your tired storyteller must end this saga with a word of
caution. Perhaps at this point we should lay down our aspirations
for a grand system and allow each of the battalions to roam
independently for a while. Proceeding on their own, examining
each other in passing, learning from each other, each taking what
is useful to their particular research program and leaving behind
what is not. In time, if the gods are kind, there might be some
convergence on some principles and possibly even a few
conclusions, so that thereupon the discipline may be a bit more
honest and helpful to humanity at large. But if there is not,
let us not take arms and violently charge each other in the name
of ideological purity - for then we might slaughter and bury much
of what is insightful and useful. Let us listen, reflect
critically, and proceed with caution.
Nonetheless, a new conceptual revolution with the ferocity and
thoroughness of the 1871 one could yet happen...and perhaps
sooner than we might expect.
Thus ends the Walrasiad. Farewell, dear reader, this storyteller
bids his leave. May the Economidae then continue to inspire our
travels and investigations in this peculiar discipline and grant
us the necessary wisdom to tell when our ideas are heading in the
right direction and when they are heading in the wrong one - and
the courage to proceed when the former is true, and the honesty
to retreat when we find ourselves in the latter.
For many years did the land of Economics, where rarely even a
derivative was to be found, thus remain. Your storyteller must
sadly report, gentle reader, that this was a time of great
silence and boredom indeed - and little but pestilence and
inanity is bredÔ to be exposed only by the occasional symposiums
provoked by troublemakers such as the god-in-exile, Sraffa, and a
particular unnameable (and doubtlessly non-Victorian) woman of imperfect repute.
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