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" "The history of economic thought is irrepressible. It would survive even if it were banned … it would be carried on in secret in underground organizations. Many economists denigrate the history of economics as mere antiquarianism but, in fact, they have deluded ideas about the history of their own subject. After all, whenever anyone has a new idea in economics, whenever anyone hankers to start a new movement or school of thought, what is the first thing he or she does? Why, it is to rummage the attic of past ideas to establish an appropriate pedigree for the new departure. … Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Marshall and Keynes all drew on the history of economics to show that they had predecessors and forerunners; even Milton Friedman, when he launched the monetarist counterrevolution against Keynes, could not resist the temptation to quote David Hume over and again. The history of economic thought cannot be abolished and, were its study declared illegal, it would be studied in basements behind locked doors.
Mark Blaug FBA (3 April 1927 – 18 November 2011) was a Dutch-born British economist.
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Cambridge theories of value and distribution themselves suffer from the very malady which they hope to cure: rhetoric apart, they are deeply infected by static, equilibrium analysis of maximizing economic agents, acting with full information in a world of perfect certainty, as in the orthodoxy they deplore. … If there is something wrong with neo-classical economics – as there may well be – the Cambridge theories share all of its weaknesses and practically none of its strengths.
Modern Austrian economists go so far as to suggest that the Walrasian approach to the problem of multimarket equilibrium is a cul de sac: if we want to understand the process of competition, rather than the equilibrium end-state achieved by competition, we must begin by discarding such static reasoning as is implied by Walrasian GE theory. I have come slowly and extremely reluctantly to the view that they are right and that we have all been wrong.
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Joan Robinson's much-awaited textbook in “modern economics” perfectly exemplifies the typical attitude of Cambridge economists to micro-economics. The whole of traditional price theory is covered in one chapter … [some] prices are formed by conventional mark-ups on prime costs, the level of the mark-up itself being left unexplained. Apart from this chapter, the book is doggedly macro-economic in treatment … A striking omission from the book is any mention of the closely related concepts of externalities and public goods, which most economists would nowadays regard as the basic ingredients of “market failure” that has come to be fruitfully applied … to problems of pollution and congestion.