A Reply to Professor Weintraub

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A Reply to Professor Weintraub Andrea Salanti Economics and Philosophy / Volume 9 / Issue 01 / April 1993, pp 139 - 144 DOI: 10.1017/S0266267100005150, Published online: 16 October 2009

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0266267100005150 How to cite this article: Andrea Salanti (1993). A Reply to Professor Weintraub. Economics and Philosophy, 9, pp 139-144 doi:10.1017/ S0266267100005150 Request Permissions : Click here

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Economics and Philosophy, 9 (1993), 139-144. Printed in the United States of America.

A REPLY TO PROFESSOR WEINTRAUB ANDREA SALANTI

Universita degli Studi di Bergamo, Italy

lit enim nihil nugacius, quant seria nugatorie tractare, ita nihil festiuius quant icta tractare nugas, ut nihil minus quam nugatus fuisse videaris.

Erasmus, 15081

Weintraub's reaction to the critique of his 1985 book that I dared to set forth in Salanti (1991) raises several (perhaps too many) questions of quite different importance. Trying to put this quarrel into some order, I will answer Weintraub's allegations according to their increasing order of relevance. SILLY MATTERS

Weintraub's choice of the title and epigraph of his comment is particularly unfortunate. Apart from two questions that I leave, out because I would be completely unable to answer,2 one might wonder what kind of passion may have prompted me to criticize his 1985 work. I hope that no one will be shocked if I admit plainly that my only "passion" in this respect is to have my papers published in outstanding journals3 and 1. Now in Miller (1979, p. 68). An English translation might be: "Nothing is sillier than treating serious subjects lightly; equally, there is nothing wittier than treating trifles in such a way as to give the impression that one is not joking at all." 2. First, why does Professor Weintraub hand out a doctoral qualification to an Italian associate professor who, to be sure, has never received a Ph.D.? Second, how much "good will" is necessary in order to see what Weintraub (1985) intended to convey to his readers? 3. We generally agree upon the view that what mainly makes a journal "outstanding" is the adoption of a (severe) refereeing process. There are two cases, however, in which such a process is commonly found not to work properly: when a paper of ours is rejected and when a critique of our views is published (in spite of its unfairness, of course). © 1993 Cambridge University Press 0266-2671/93 $3.00 + .00. http://journals.cambridge.org

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noticed by scholars who are engaged in the same field of research I am currently interested in. If I judge from the reactions of some colleagues (and by Weintraub himself, for that matter), I must conclude that this time I succeeded.

MERE RHETORIC

Weintraub's comment also raises a number of merely rhetorical points. The following four questions, in particular, seem to deserve some attention: 1. Do his subsequently developed ideas really matter? 2. What constitutes the "extraneous padding" that might simply be removed from my paper? 3. Does he believe in the success or "goodness" of general equilibrium theory (GET)? 4. What is wrong in taking from Gerard Debreu (rather than from Roy Weintraub) the cue for understanding what an axiomatized theory represents? What I can offer in this respect is summarized in the following answers numbered according to the corresponding questions as stated above: (1) Absolutely not. Weintraub (1985) contains "ideas" that one can discuss independently from anything else their author may have thought before, during, and after their elaboration. Weintraub (1993, note 3) himself observes that "[his] own developing ideas would not be relevant here were it not for the fact that [I am] fully aware of them. . . [My] choosing to ignore them makes [my] comments on [his] 1985 book not only dated but somewhat beside the point." His conclusion, however, is obviously a non sequitur. It assumes that I am criticizing "Roy Weintraub" rather than "Weintraub (1985)." Does it mean, indeed, that had I not been aware of Weintraub's "developing ideas," then my comments would be "dated" but not "beside the point"? (2) What Weintraub calls "extraneous padding" does actually contain certain criticisms to which it would be interesting to hear his reply (for instance, my remarks on the sharp division of intellectual labor in economics (cf. Salanti, 1991, pp. 228-30). (3) Anyone who reads Weintraub's comment without knowing his 1985 book might well think that his belief in the "goodness" of GET is a product of my lively imagination. Unfortunately, my inventiveness is not so great. The textual evidence is just in Weintraub (1985), for all to see:

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[Weintraub (1979)] was an exercise in appraisal of the literature on the microfoundations of macroeconomics. I argued that the literature could best be understood as an attempt to link two scientific research programs, which I identified as the Keynesian program and the neo-Walrasian program. The present work attempts to see whether, and in what sense, neo-Walrasian economics is good economics.

(p. 55; italics added) Since Weintraub (1985) claims that GET satisfies both Lakatosian criteria of appraisal, the impartial reader may well conclude that his answer to the above question cannot but be affirmative. Moreover, it should be noted that Weintraub actually uses Lakatos's methodology in the most favorable way for GET. After all, as Backhouse (1993) points out, following a strict Lakatosian perspective there is apparently "no reason not to place [GET] in the protective belt, with all that this implies for the way it is appraised." What this would imply, however, is simply that GET, being devoid of empirical content, should be regarded as "bad" economics. " (4) Of course, I cannot oblige Weintraub to agree with Debreu's (1984, 1986) views about the separateness of the mathematical form from the corresponding economic content, but he ought to be more'explidt about why he believes such a view to be "based on a complex misunderstanding of language and mathematics." Note, however, that Weintraub may Well reject the main tenets of mathematical formalisms, but he cannot deny that Hubert's philosophy of mathematics exerted some influence on the neo-Walrasian program.4 SOMETHING WORTHY OF MORE SERIOUS DISCUSSION

Coming to more relevant issues, it seems to me that the very object of our disagreement is about what can be said of GET in a Lakatosian perspective and what has really been accomplished in Weintraub (1988). In my view, if one takes a strictly Lakatosian perspective in appraising general equilibrium theory, a few remarks suffice to reject it. Mark Blaug, for instance, ends his six-page discussion of GET with the following conclusion: "The widespread belief that every economic theory must be fitted into the GE[T] mold if it is to qualify as rigorous science has perhaps been more responsible than any other intellectual force for the purely abstract and nonempirical character of so much of modern economic reasoning" (Blaug, 1980, p. 192). In this respect, Weintraub's (1985) attempt could have been very interesting precisely because of his proposal to appraise general equilibrium analysis in a quite different way (that is according to Lakatos's methodology of mathematics). His attempt 4. For an interesting account of the intellectual origins of modern GET, see Punzo (1991). Cf. also Ingrao and Israel (1990).

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would have been successful, however, only if theories in the protective belt of the neo-Walrasian research program were (or even could be) actually "derived" from the prospected hard core, and this is just what I challenged in my 1991 article. In his comment, Weintraub claims that his 1988 contribution was meant precisely to be "[his] attempt to connect the core to empirical work in theory sequences in the belts" (Weintraub, 1993, p. 136). Weintraub (1988) deals with a single instance in a very specific field of research in applied microeconomics, and, as we know, one swallow does not make a summer.5- However, since Weintraub seems to attach much importance to that paper, let me comment upon it a bit further. In Weintraub (1988, p. 214), as well as in some of his previous works (including Weintraub, 1985), the hard core of the neo-Walrasian program is characterized by the following propositions: HC1: There exist economic agents. HC2: Agents have preferences over outcomes. HC3: Independent agents optimize subject to constraint. HC4: Choices are made in interrelated markets. HC5: Agents have full relevant knowledge. HC6: Observable outcomes are coordinated and must be discussed with reference to equilibrium states. As far as I can see, what Weintraub (1988) convincingly shows is that McElroy's and Horney's efforts in developing and "testing" a theory of Nash-bargained household decisions6 lead to a reinterpretation of HC1, HC2, and HC3, while no interpretive shift is required as far as the other three hard-core propositions are concerned, and that such reinterpretation could not have been prompted by a Chicago-Marshallian modeling strategy (cf. Weintraub, 1988, pp. 223-24). What is much less convincing is his further claim that such a move "could have been made only by a neo-Walrasian" (Weintraub, 1988, p. 224; italics added), this because one could equally say that such a move was simply the result of a reinterpretation of the main tenets of methodological individualism in the light of noncooperative game theory (which is by no means coextensive with general equilibrium analysis).7'8 5. This is the reason why in my article I referred to Weintraub (1988) only in a footnote (Salanti, 1991, p. 226, n. 9) without devoting to it any further comment. 6. Complete bibliographical references can be found in Weintraub (1988). 7. For the sake of brevity, I abstain from discussing here whether such a reinterpretation is compatible with the Lakatosian notion of a same research program or whether it would be better to speak of two different research programs. 8. Toward the end of his comment, Weintraub also touches on something that I regard as an important methodological point, that is, how an "internal" criticism should be correctly characterized. On this matter, in order to avoid unnecessary repetitions, let me refer to Salanti (1993).

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FINAL REMARKS

I would have been very happy to confine the previous discussion to the relevant issues alone. My choice of a different approach, to be sure, does not come from my inclination to play the same game as Weintraub, but from Stanley Fish's advice that [T]he point that some methods of persuasion are better than others is certainly interesting, to the point, and true. Some methods of persuasion are better than others but you cannot name in advance what they are. That is, some methods of persuasion are better than others, and it depends - and this is, of course, a common place on the context: It depends on the job you want to get done, it depends, as Richard Rorty would say, on what you want. (Fish, 1988, p. 23) Of course, I know which methods of persuasion I prefer, but I cannot expect all readers to have the same preferences. If in this respect some readers think that we should look for some commonly accepted rules, I cannot but agree. Unfortunately, however, prescriptive epistemologies are not in the latest fashion nowadays. For my part, I continue to believe that there is much to be gained in remembering Popper's distinction between World2 and World3.1 know that such a distinction, despite its long and respectable history in western philosophy, is more and more often regarded as a relic of the past. In so doing, however, we are very likely to become unable to distinguish between what really matters and mere rigmarole. REFERENCES Backhouse, Roger. 1993. "Lakatosian Perspectives on General Equilibrium Analysis." Economics and Philosophy (forthcoming). Blaug, Mark. 1980. The Methodology of Economics. Or How Economists Explain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Debreu, Gerard. 1984. "Economic Theory in the Mathematical Mode." American Economic Review 74:267-78. — . 1986. "Theoretic Models: Mathematical Form and Economic Content." Econometrica 54:1259-70. Fish, Stanley. 1988. "Comments from Outside Economics." In The Consequences of Economic Rlietoric, edited by Arjo Klamer, Donald N. McCloskey, and Robert M. Solow, pp. 21-30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ingrao, Bruna, and Giorgio Israel. 1990. The Invisible Hand. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Miller, Clarence H. (editor). 1979. Moriae encomium id est stultitiae laus, Vol. IV-3 of Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami. Amsterdam: North-Holland. Punzo, Lionello. 1991. "The School of Mathematical Formalism and the Viennese Circle of Mathematical Economics." Journal of the History of Economic Thought 13:1-18. Salanti, Andrea. 1991. "Roy Weintraub's Studies in Appraisal. Lakatosian Consolations or Something Else?" Economics and Philosophy 7:221-34. . 1993. "Lakatosian Perspectives on General Equilibrium Analysis: A Comment." Economics and Philosophy (forthcoming).

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Weintraub, E. Roy. 1979. Microfoundations. New York: Cambridge University Press. . 1985. General Equilibrium Analysis. Studies in Appraisal. New York: Cambridge University Press. . 1988. "The Neo-Walrasian Program Is Empirically Progressive." In The Popperian Legacy in Economics, edited by Neil de Marchi, pp. 213-27. New York: Cambridge University Press. . 1993. "But Doctor Salanti, Bumblebees Really Do Fly." Economics and Philosophy 9:135-138.

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