Robert J. Wolfson

The Economic Dynamics of Joseph Schumpeter

Aside from such heterodox figures as the Marxists, Hobson, Veblen, Commons, and Mitchell, most later economists narrowed the scope of concern of the economist. Although it was recognized that a state of dynamic equilibrium was not likely to be reached, it nevertheless represented a true equilibrium condition for the economy, and its unattainability was regarded as a consequence of a variety of essentially exogenous interferences with the economic process, not subject to analysis by economists.

Points of View, Scientific Theories and Econometric Models

The relationship between a class of structural forms and a single reduced form econometric model is discussed. These are shown to be empirically equivalent. It is made clear that choice of a particular structural form for estimation, rather than another of the same class, rests on a priori heuristic and computational considerations, not on empirical or logical grounds. Alternative scientific strategies are discussed briefly.

Philosophy, Economics and Capital Theory

Daniel Hausman is one of a very small number of modem scholars who have seriously combined great skill as philosophers of social science with deep study of economics, especially economic theory, so as to cast strong light upon the scientific status of economics. Of the two books discussed here, Hausman’s Capital, Profits and Prices (hereafter referred to as CPP) is the more original contribution. The other, The Philosophy of Economics (hereafter PE), of which Hausman is editor, is an interesting, indeed the best extant, anthology of selections on the scientific status and method of economics.

Progress in the development of a formal lexicon for the social sciences

I would like, first, to say a few words about Dick Rudner. Dick was an extraordinary person. In his intelligence and wit, his warmth, his utter decency and his outrage at immorality, he epitomized the notion of humaneness. To have been able to know him, and to work and play with him for so many years as I did, was a great stroke of good fortune. I am going to tell you of a job of dictionary construction one about which I think there are grounds for optimism as to its feasibility and utility. What is of particular interest here is that it is a project which was begun by Dick Rudner and myself in 1958, in which we were joined by Bob Barrett six years later, and on which the three of us worked, albeit rather sporadically, until Dicks death. Barrett and I expect, within the next few years, to complete this work. Dick and I met toward the end of 1956, shortly after we had both come to Michigan State University as young faculty members he in Philosophy and I in Economics. When we met we realized that we shared many intellectual attitudes and concerns. Over the course of a year or so we began to appreciate that our complementary abilities, along with these shared interests and attitudes, offered a basis for some interesting work together.

New Consumer Theory and The Relations Between Goods

With the exception of the theory of consumer behavior, the entire literature of decision/choice theory is void of concern with the interior structure of outcomes which are being valued and chosen among. Throughout this literature, with that exception, outcomes are treated as atomic wholes. In such treatments the matter of primary interest becomes the process whereby, given certain information, the decision can best be made so as to conform to prescribed criteria which are taken to be the conditions of rational decision. The information which is assumed can be summed up under three headings. 1. The values assigned the outcomes (whether through the intermediation of utility functions or preference orderings). 2. The character of information regarding states of the world which might possibly come about, (ignorance or error1), and their probabilities of occurrence (certainty, risk, uncertainty2). 3. The character of information regarding the connection between actions taken by the chooser/actor and the ensuing outcome, given the information about states of the world.

Demographic Theory and the Theory of Economic Development: A Review

2) Investigations into the nature of policies which would improve the circumstances of the economy, increasing what we now call the gross national product or the national income of the economy, or regulating trade so that the national economy would have a positive trade balance with those parts of the world not under its dominion. (It was in this form that concern with economic development first appeared in economic writings.)