Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-x5cpj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-31T04:24:57.285Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - Surveying dynamics

from Part II - From history to interpretation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2010

E. Roy Weintraub
Affiliation:
Duke University, North Carolina
Get access

Summary

The state of the economy, for instance, cannot be used unproblematically to explain science, because it itself is a very controversial outcome of another soft science, economics. As we saw earlier, it is extracted out of hundreds of statistical institutions, questionnaires, polls and surveys, and treated in centers of calculation. Something like the Gross National Product is an n the order visual display which, to be sure, may be combined to other paper forms, but which is no more outside the frail and tiny networks built by economists than stars, electrons, or plate tectonics.

Bruno Latour (1987, p. 256)

In the period following the publication of Samuelson's articles on stability and equilibrium, a period that included the 1940s, the literature concerned with economic dynamics permeated several different subliteratures, one being that on the microfoundations of macroeconomics, which I have discussed elsewhere (Weintraub 1979). A second subliterature was that of endogenous business cycles, which attempted to trace out the time paths of economic variables. By the late 1950s and early 1960s that work had been linked to the 1930s literature on capital theory, as well as classical writings, thereby creating the modern literature on growth theory. In a third grouping, the writings were more directly concerned with understanding the implications of modeling economic systems, usually multi-market systems, as dynamic systems in the sense in which Samuelson had brought the term into common use in the economics literature; those contributions are now read as concerning the problem of the stability of the competitive equilibrium.

Type
Chapter
Information
Stabilizing Dynamics
Constructing Economic Knowledge
, pp. 128 - 148
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1991

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Surveying dynamics
  • E. Roy Weintraub, Duke University, North Carolina
  • Book: Stabilizing Dynamics
  • Online publication: 04 August 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511571831.007
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Surveying dynamics
  • E. Roy Weintraub, Duke University, North Carolina
  • Book: Stabilizing Dynamics
  • Online publication: 04 August 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511571831.007
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Surveying dynamics
  • E. Roy Weintraub, Duke University, North Carolina
  • Book: Stabilizing Dynamics
  • Online publication: 04 August 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511571831.007
Available formats
×