Through the (Economics) Glass Darkly

Abstract

It was not for naught that the late Dame Joan Robinson, that voluble and creative presence in mid-century economics (increasingly, I find it necessary to identify her!), once commented that people should study economics ' 'to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists. But below the elder statesman level, there is little dissent from prevailing opinion: those serving in the trenches of dissertation research can spare little time to doubt the suppositions underlying our intellectual structure or the mathematical and statistical equipment we need to build it. Later we must be concerned with tenure and promotion, and we stifle our misgivings, hoping that one day all the little pieces we work with will fit logically together and be compatible with the world outside. We push on, until we despair of understanding the whole and console ourselves that there must be some underlying wisdom that knits together all the pieces. We will leave their total integration to souls wiser than we and settle for the conviction that our small bit is contributing to the advance of the whole. Doubts gnaw, however, more insistently and uncomfortably in some than in others. For them, the suspended disbelief of conference sessions yields to the cynicism of the corridors when moving between meetingrooms. But at this point we have become so much a part of the system that personal pride and professional loyalty mute the voices of dissent. Indeed, recent news stories attending the publication of the The New Palgrave-ihe revision of the