Just as Hegel is said to have understood his philosophy for the first time when he read its French translation, Vilfredo Pareto could have learned wh… - Paul Samuelson

Social Darwinism is a perverted borrowing from what can be validly established for biology. When I contemplate strong claims by a Richard Posner that law has evolved historically a la Pareto, or arguments that a Coase Theorem ensures that deadweight loss is at its feasible minimum, I fear that von Neumann and Morgenstern are spinning in their graves and Charles Darwin is wondering why he left his barnacles, pigeons, and earthworms.
An unsupported claim by an economist- Darwinist does not acquire validity from a cited analogy with evolution. Truth must find its own legs to stand on.

There were many Moliére characters speaking Keynesian prose in the depression years before 1936. What Keynes’s General Theory gave us, which Ohlin’s inspired journalisms could not at all offer, was a new manageable paradigm that we could explicitly express — and test, and criticize, and improve, ... , and be bewitched by.
Long before Kuhn, Schumpeter used to insist that old theories are not killed by simple facts: It takes a new theory to kill an old one. The mind cannot operate in terms of a melange of sensations. It needs a road map to perceive patterns of regularity and persistence.

Modigliani's theory was a powerful searchlight on what was happening... It is the best explanation of what has actually been happening in the great swing of American life since the 1950's.