I Brute Facts Antiseptically Free of Institutional Context In 1951, Nobel Laureate Wassily put his finger on what was wrong with economics. It had remained a deductive system resting upon a static set of premises, when what was needed was an economics that would combine economic and theory. The new economics would be called interindustry or input-output analysis (Leontief 1966: 14). According to it is easy to compute complete table of input requirements at any given level of output, provided we know its input These input ratios could be calculated from engineering data on design and operating procedure (ibid., 24-26). For and, I suspect, a large number of economists in 1951, technological dependent only on chemical and physical laws of nature--what I shall call Leontief coefficients--were indisputable. It would take so many units of coke to produce a ton of pig iron whether or not there was a human being alive on earth to witness that transformation. The coefficients were bedrock of subsequent economic analysis. They were analogous to what philosopher John R. Searle has termed facts (Searle 1995: 27). These brute about (unlike facts I shall discuss later on in this lecture) do not depend for their existence on human speech or human ritual. For same reason tree will make a sound in forest even if no one were there to listen, coke will smelt iron into steel even if no one is there to comprehend spectacle (ibid.). A few years later, another distinguished economist of post-war period, Francis M. Bator, demonstrated his commitment to an alternative version of the neo-Walrasian research program by preparing a concise review of what he called simple analytics of welfare maximization. The review appeared in American Economic Review in 1957 (Bator 1957). Unlike Leontief, Bator allowed for substitution among factors of and hence for variable input ratios. The degree of variation, or elasticity of factor substitution, was still regulated by certain brute about technology, however. These brute were part of state of art of current technology, which was assumed to change slowly and to be less obviously dependent on incentives. Bator nicely summarized three necessary equilibrium that all rational economic systems had to satisfy if social welfare were to be at a maximum (ibid.). Although Bator's three equilibrium by themselves did not completely solve problem of maximizing social welfare, they did reappear as part of final maximum-welfare solution once so-called Bergsonian social welfare function had been defined. The three equilibrium were also used as a scientific justification for government intervention in settings. Bator made it clear that these were antiseptically independent of institutional context (ibid.). II Brute Facts and Austrian School Not all economists were enamored with neoWalrasian research program. According to several authorities, modern Austrian school moved in other directions and rejected general equilibrium for a market process approach (Vaughn 1994). Still, despite methodological disagreements, modern Austrians joined with neoWalrasians on at least one point that I wish to emphasize in this paper: Austrians accepted priority of brute about in form of the given technological background conditions that inform economic analysis. The Austrian economists generally agreed with and other neoWalrasians that brute of technology set objective limits on outcomes available to any economic system. Indeed, it was Austrian Gottfried Haberler who succeeded in organizing fledgling field of international economics around concept of production possibilities frontier, which itself became a favorite expository device among text book writers (Haberler 1936). …