Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- 1 The fearful spheres of Pascal and Parmenides
- 2 Everything an economist needs to know about physics but was probably afraid to ask: The history of the energy concept
- 3 Body, motion, and value
- 4 Science and substance theories of value in political economy to 1870
- 5 Neoclassical economic theory: An irresistable field of force meets an immovable object
- 6 The corruption of the field metaphor, and the retrogression to substance theories of value: Neoclassical production theory
- 7 The ironies of physics envy
- 8 Universal history is the story of different intonations given to a handful of metaphors
- Appendix: The mathematics of the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formalisms
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - The corruption of the field metaphor, and the retrogression to substance theories of value: Neoclassical production theory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 June 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- 1 The fearful spheres of Pascal and Parmenides
- 2 Everything an economist needs to know about physics but was probably afraid to ask: The history of the energy concept
- 3 Body, motion, and value
- 4 Science and substance theories of value in political economy to 1870
- 5 Neoclassical economic theory: An irresistable field of force meets an immovable object
- 6 The corruption of the field metaphor, and the retrogression to substance theories of value: Neoclassical production theory
- 7 The ironies of physics envy
- 8 Universal history is the story of different intonations given to a handful of metaphors
- Appendix: The mathematics of the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formalisms
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
It is the purpose of this work to show that the distribution of income of a society is controlled by a natural law, and that this law, if it worked without friction, would give to every agent of production the wealth that agent creates.
John Bates Clark, Distribution of Wealth, p. vUntil the laws of thermodynamics are repealed, I shall continue to relate outputs to inputs – i.e., to believe in production functions.
Paul Samuelson, Collected Papers [1972a, III, p. 174]Anyone who makes it their business to keep up with academic economics cannot fail to notice that something strange has happened since World War II. While the exact contours of the altered ambiance are difficult to pin down, it might be characterized loosely as a certain ambivalence about the out-and-out truth (for lack of a more precise word) of the doctrines that comprise neoclassical economic theory. While recantations on the road to Damascus are still relatively rare, there does seem to be a surfeit of retreat to a vague paradigm of sophisticated general equilibrium models whenever a critic seems on the verge of scoring a point at neoclassical expense; or it may show up as a disparaging irony about the plausibility of the assumptions of the model (Klamer 1983). I have also encountered something like this phenomenon in reaction to the theses broached in the previous chapter.
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- Information
- More Heat than LightEconomics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature's Economics, pp. 276 - 353Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989