from Peter Radford

Lars Syll seems to have started a perpetual conversation when he posted a comment about Tony Lawson’s longstanding complaints about realism in economics. I don’t want to get dragged into what appears to be an endless, and pointless, debate … but.

The debate is endless because some economists seem to thrive on endlessness. That is to say they react with horror at closure on any topic. Thus arguments begun in the early 1800’s still roil along happily employing at least a few economists who have specialized in whatever it is that stirred the arguments back then. No one seems inclined to end the discussion, instead it is added to the ever increasing inventory of points-of-view-come- theoretical-stances that clutter economics and make it opaque to all but the most intrepid cognoscenti.

Ah, but there are others who have, in their own minds at least, arrived at closure. And that’s where the pointless part comes in.

You see they achieved closure by departing from reality so it is pointless to argue with them about realism. They don’t care. They really, truly, don’t. On the contrary, they see reality as an obstacle to be overcome. It is a departure from the pristine world they want to create, inhabited as it is by all sorts of inconveniences like human frailty, human foible, and human inconsistency. Those there things – foible, frailty, and inconsistency – are the very devil to model nicely in mathematics, so they have had to be tossed out of the realm of economic theory.
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