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Modernist and Pre-modernist Explanation in Economics
Kevin Quinn (Bowling Green State University, USA)
© Copyright 2004 Kevin
Quinn
Science likes to imagine that
it has vanquished religious approaches to the world, but it remains vulnerable
to religious criticism precisely because it remains religious in important
respects. The idea that truth is singular, rather than potentially plural,
that it is non-arbitrary, and that it
is meaningful – all of these dogmas amount to a survival, in the heart of
science, of an essentially religious, pre-modern, approach to the world. The silly, post-modern-inspired argument
that science, as one more interpretation of the world, stands on equal
footing with religious interpretations, can thus (for different reasons than
it imagines: the pre-modernism that clings to science is anti-science, not its essence) gain a foothold. To avoid
confusion with religion, science needs to shed its vestigial religiosity and
achieve its modernist potential. As Shakespeare knew, reality is “a tale told
by an idiot, signifying nothing” – divine or otherwise: it is not an allegory
for God – pre-modern science gets that right – but neither is it an allegory
for Nature, or Reason or Progress, for Fitness or Complexity or anything
else.
Pre-modern Science: Smith and Coase on Smith
Smith’s
concept of The Invisible Hand, many have argued, has roots in theology. And in general it is easy to find passages in
Smith that seem to rely on the notion of a divinely-ordained harmony in the
world. In his essay, “Adam Smith’s View of Man1,”
Ronald Coase argues, contra Jacob Viner, that Smith’s views on psychology in The Theory of Moral Sentiments do not,
despite appearances, have theological underpinnings. Smith, says Coase,
in showing “that particular characteristics of human beings which were in
various ways disagreeable were accompanied by offsetting social benefits2,”
did not typically appeal to a
divine harmony as an explanation. I
think he makes a persuasive case in this regard. Smith appeals not to God but
to Nature as the well-designing author of our harmonious-despite-appearances
psychology. Coase
goes on to say that, in this respect, Smith was essentially an evolutionist
before his time: “In all these cases nature, as Adam Smith would say, or natural selection, as we would say, has
made sure that man possesses those properties which would secure the
propagation of the species. (emphasis added).3”
Examine this
astonishing statement. To vindicate Smith’s scientific credentials, Coase assimilates a patent providentialism
to modern science! What is the difference that makes a difference between an
evolutionist providentialism and a divine one? And
yet, of course, to this day evolutionary theory is marred by such providentialism –
a thoroughly anti-scientific excrescence. The idea that evolution promotes
the good of the species is more or less gone, thankfully – though it had a
long run. But the idea that evolution promotes the good of the organism is
alive and kicking. The fact that
Darwin himself, in his theory of sexual selection, rejected this more subtle
species of providentialism, has not prevented its
remaining intact in biology until fairly recently. But we still have
prominent evolutionists trying to explain the human brain, human art and
science, human morality, by appeal to the survival value of these innovations
– and rejecting more or less out of hand explanations that fail to identify
such survival value.
The history
of the reception of the theory of sexual selection in biology, recently well
recounted by Geoffrey Miller in his book, The
Mating Mind4, is a case study in the struggle of the
pre-modern and the modern in science, and can serve as a preliminary to a
more general discussion of the elements of what I am calling modernist
explanation. This will be followed by an account of the struggles of
modernism in that most pre-modern of sciences, economics, culminating in a
claim that the real scandal that Keynes’ work represented for the discipline
was its modernism.
Sexual
selection, especially the idea of runaway sexual selection developed by H. A.
Fisher in 19305, makes clear in a startling way that adaptive
traits may hinder the organism’s chances of survival. The peacock’s tail,
famously, reduces the peacock’s
chances of survival but increases the chances that its genes will spread by
making it more attractive to mates. A providentialist
may still take solace in the thought that the female preference for long
tails remains unexplained, but here is where, in its runaway version, sexual
selection becomes strikingly modern, in my terms: the female preference for
long tails, so the theory goes, can be self-justifying. If enough females
have a bias toward longer tails in mates, the preference for longer tails
will be adaptive, by leading to offspring with longer tails who will be
preferred as mates! Certain
conceptions of science, those I am calling pre-modern, find this sort of
theory prima facie absurd. It opens
the door, patently, to arbitrariness and indeterminacy and unpredictability:
why not short tales? The ground starts to slip out from under the
explanation: how can a “scientific” explanation make something, in effect,
its own cause? And providentialism is obviously
shaken to its roots by this sort of thinking, Miller summarizes the reaction
to Fisher of the famous biologist Julian Huxley: “He defined evolutionary
progress as ‘improvement in efficiency of living’ and ‘increased control over
and independence of the environment’. Since sexual ornaments had high costs
that undermined survival chances and did not help an animal cope with a
hostile environment, Huxley viewed them as anti-progressive, degenerate
indulgences6.” Huxley was not unique: sexual selection, which
Darwin regarded as equally as important as natural selection, did not enter
the mainstream of biological thinking until more than 100 years after Darwin
wrote – until the 1980's.
The Modern
The
modernism I want to discuss finds its proper antonym not in the post-modern but in the pre-modern or
traditional. The sense I intend is most adequately delineated in Marshall
Berman's All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity7,
an enormous and sui generis
piece of scholarship. The hallmarks of modernism I want to focus on are,
first, the subsumption of ends by means, and,
second, closely related, the ubiquity of self-reference. An example will clarify. How does modern
art differ from pre-modern art? One
important way, surely is that for a good deal of the former, art is not the
transparent means to an end outside itself, mimesis or representation, but
instead becomes its own subject--art about art, art for its own sake, etc. So
art, traditionally the means of representing the world, now seeks to
represent its own activity--the end has been subsumed by the means in some
sense--and self-reference, with its associated paradoxes invariably moves center stage. An
associated idea is that of bootstrap phenomena. Bootstraps, as in
"pulling oneself up by one's own" are self-generated or self-caused
phenomena. Modern thinking spurns foundations: think of Sartre's notion that
man's essence is to have no essence, to be condemned to be free and forced to
create his own meaning, willy-nilly. The absence of external foundations,
theological or otherwise, makes modernity both exhilarating and
terrifying. It would fill reams and
reams of paper to do justice to all the ways in which the theme of means
become ends, and the associated themes of self-reference and bootstrapping,
are played out in area after area of modern thought and thought about the
modern.
I don't intend these three elements to capture the
richness of Berman's argument, but I believe they are central to modernism in
the sense he uses it, although in no way exhaustive of that sense. Summing up
his argument, he writes:
To
be modern . . . is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to
find one's world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal.
Examples
of "Modernist" Explanation
How and where do we see modernism in this sense in scientific
explanation? What follows surveys the ground with a collection of examples,
some of which will be further elaborated in later sections.
1. Asset Bubbles: Why does an asset
have a high price today? Because it is expected to have an even higher price
tomorrow. Alternatively, why does an asset have a low price today? Because it
is expected to have an even lower price tomorrow. (See Keynes’ famous Ch. 12
in the General Theory8, on
the stock market as beauty pageant.)
2. Increasing Returns: Suppose that there
is a positive externality associated with investment, so that the greater the
level of aggregate investment, the higher the average level of return on
investment. (Investment in knowledge may have this characteristic). Then we
can ask, why is the level of investment so high? Because the rate of return
on investment is high. But why is the rate of return on investment high?
Because the level of investment is high.
Alternatively,--in the same economy, same fundamentals-- why is the
level of investment so low? Because the rate of return on investment is low.
And why is that? Because the level of investment is low. (See Weill, Phillipe, "Animal
Spirits and Increasing Returns”9).
3. Conventions: Why do you, an American, drive on the right side of the road?
Because you expect others to do the same.
Why do others do so? Because they expect you and others to do so as
well. Collectively, then, we drive on the right side of the road because we
drive on the right side on the road. Alternatively, why do you, an
Englishman, drive on the left side of the road. Because you expect other
English people to do the same, etc.
4. Money: Why do you give up real goods
and services for worthless pieces of paper? Because you expect others to give
you (different) real goods and services for the paper in turn tomorrow.
Alternatively--same fundamentals--why do you refuse to give up real goods for
worthless pieces of paper? Because you
expect others to refuse as well10.
5. Co-evolution: Why does animal A have
such long, sharp teeth? Because animal B, its prey, has such a hard carapace.
Why does animal B have such a hard carapace?
Because animal A, its predator, has such sharp teeth. Alternatively--same
fundamentals--why does animal A have such short, dull teeth. Because animal
B, its prey, is so soft and mushy. Why is animal B so soft and mushy? Because animal A, its predator, has such
short, dull teeth. (See Sigmund, Games of Life, on co-evolution.11)
6. Runaway
Redux: Why is the peacock's tail so long.
Because long tails are preferred by females, so the low survival value is
offset by the increased chance of mating. But why do females prefer long
tails? Because, given a substantial
group of females in the population who prefer long tails, a female with a
gene for preferring long tails will also carry the gene for long tails. Its
offspring will thus do better reproductively.
7. Leijonhufvud’s Keynes: Imagine saving and investment
curves as functions of the interest rate. Saving is saving out of full
employment income. The intersection determines the Wicksellian
natural rate of interest. The investment curve shifts back. The natural rate
of interest falls. But bear speculators with inelastic expectations sell
bonds to prevent the adjustment. They expect the rate of interest to remain
at the old level. Their action leads to a positive gap between full
employment saving and investment, a
shifted-in saving function due to falling income, and an equilibrium
rate of interest higher than the new natural rate which will now prevail even
without speculation. The bears are proved correct. Their expectations that
the interest rate would not fall have been confirmed, for the nonce. This is
Keynes as interpreted by Axel Leijonhufvud in On
Keynesian Economics and the Economics of Keynes12. Why is the
rate of interest so high? Because it was expected to be high.
8. 19th Century Capitalism: How can the
level of investment be so high while the level of consumption is so low? Means of Production are being produced
today to be used to produce means of production tomorrow etc. -- the means
have become ends. Alternatively, a low level of investment might make sense
despite robust consumption if the level of investment will be low tomorrow --
the means of production needed for the consumption goods industry is high,
but the means of production needed to produce means of production are low.
So modernist explanations,
I shall stipulate, are characterized by:
- The ubiquity of self-reference : X
because, ultimately, X.
- No appeal to fundamentals: God,
providence, Reason, Efficiency, Fitness.
c.
The reversal of means/end relationships. Means
become ends in themselves.
d.
Bootstrapping phenomena, as in "pulling
yourself up by your own" As a consequence, arbitrariness, and multiple equilibria.
Modernism on the Fringe: Marx
In
economics, the locus classicus of modernism, indeed
the source--in the Manifesto-- of the phrase Berman uses as the title of
his book, is the work of Karl Marx, definitely far out of the
mainstream. Marx, throughout his
writing, returns again and again to the essential difference between a
pre-modern economy of small producers where, in his well-known terminology,
exchange proceeds according to the transparent schema C-M-C' (a commodity of one type, C, is
exchanged for money, M, which is in turn used to purchase a different
commodity C'), on the one hand; and
the modern capitalist economy, whose dynamism springs from its obedience to a
diametrically opposed schema: M-C-M', on the other. Here, money purchases
commodities (labor and raw materials) which are
fashioned into goods to be sold for still more money, so that the process can
begin again. Unlike the first, this second process has no natural stopping
point, and no foundation or rationale outside of itself, in some pre-existing
human needs, the need to satisfy which begins and the satisfaction of which
ends the exchange process in the first schema. The mere means in the first
schema, money, has become the end in the second. And what is the money for? To create more money. Thinking about the
second schema, we experience the same dizziness, the same hall-of-mirrors
effect that I would argue characterizes the modernist turn in all areas of
life and culture. (I think of this modernist experience as the Land 'O Lakes
effect, after the butter box of my youth, which pictures an Indian woman
holding a box of butter, on which is pictured an Indian woman holding a box
of butter, on which is pictured . . .)
Marx's most succinct definition of capital captures this modernist
theme beautifully. He calls capital "self-expanding value". Again we have a self-referring infinity in
which means has become end: value creating value creating value . . . . Our
pre-modern, traditionalist, religious inclination is to ask "to what
end?" and to feel frustrated by our inability to get an answer.
Marx argued
that to represent the modern capitalist economy as, underneath the trappings
of a sophisticated financial system and a highly complex division of labor, nothing but a barter economy operating according
to C-M-C', a giant means to satisfy the end of human consumption, was a huge
mistake. He raged against the "Robinsonades"
of the classical economists -- their attempts to explain the workings of a
modern capitalist economy by telling stories about Robinson Crusoe solving
his economic problem (the economic problem) all alone on his desert
island. The idea that capital,
the dynamic process of self-expanding value whose revolutionary consequences
Marx documented, could be understood by analogy with the fishing net that
Robinson sacrificed some potential fish today to construct, in order
transparently to increase his fish consumption tomorrow -- Marx found absurd
and laughable. On the contrary, the
capitalism he saw and described was just as capable of producing means of
production today to increase the capacity for producing means of production
tomorrow, which in turn would make possible further means of production ad
infinitum--to produce for production's sake, as it were. The
economic world he described, in other words, was a modern economy, not
the pre-modern and traditional economy of a Robinson Crusoe. To miss this
distinction, Marx would have said, is to miss, in effect, everything.
Thoroughly
Modern Maynard
Prior to
Keynes, however, the mainstream of the profession did miss this
distinction, and, despite Keynes, still in large part does. What are the "representative agent
" models so beloved of modern macroeconomists, real business cyclists
and others, if not hi-tech Robinsonades?
I believe
Keynes' modernism was pervasive. Its most obvious manifestations, however,
can seem at first sight fairly isolated in his work, and have been so treated
by his interpreters. The Keynesian who
believes Keynes' message to have been well captured in the Hicksian ISLM apparatus has
very little use, it would seem, for Keynes' brilliant Chapter 12 in The
General Theory, "The State of Long-term Expectation"13.
Here is Keynes' oft-cited discussion
of the Stock Market, of Infinitely-lived Asset valuation in general. The modernism of this chapter is hard to
miss. Here we are asked to contemplate the bootstrap character of the
valuation of an open-ended asset whose price today depends on dividends it is
expected to pay, to be sure, but also on the price it is expected to have
tomorrow, which latter price will depend on the price it is expected to have
further on in the future, and so on ad infinitum. Keynes' asks us to take seriously the
notion that the asset's price may very well lose any connection with the
"solid" fundamentals and become an airy bubble of self-fulfilling
expectations. It is important to see,
too, that such an essentially modernist phenomenon Keynes regards not as
temporary and bound to disappear just as soon as professionals -- investors
knowledgeable about the fundamentals -- appear on the scene, but as
comparatively long-lasting and immune to arbitrage:
This battle
of wits to anticipate the basis of conventional valuation a few months hence,
rather than the prospective yield of an investment over a long term of years,
does not even require gulls among the public to feed the maws of the
professionals; -- it can be played by professionals among themselves.
Nor is it necessary that anyone
should keep his simple faith in the conventional basis of valuation having
any genuine long-term validity. For it
is so to speak a game of Snap, of Old
Maid, of Musical Chairs--a pastime in
which he is victor who says Snap neither too soon nor too late, who
passes the Old Maid to his neighbor before the game
is over, who secures a chair for
himself before the music stops. These games can be played with zest and enjoyment, though all the players know that
it is the Old Maid which is circulating, or that when the music stops some of
the players will find themselves unseated.14
In
contemporary terms, Keynes is talking in this passage about "rational
bubbles".15 They are
rational because there is no assumption of stupidity on the part of
purchasers of the bubbled asset, stupidity that a canny professional might
profit from--and by doing so burst the bubble. The bubbled asset provides a
normal return in expectation, with the bubble itself growing at the rate of return,
and therefore passes a no-arbitrage or efficient markets test, no matter how
wildly divergent from fundamentals its price becomes, and is destined
increasingly to become.
Only an
infinitely-lived agent could undo, via arbitrage, a bubble on an infinitely-lived
asset, which fact puts Keynes' reminder that "in the long run we're all
dead" in a whole new light! It is
somewhat ironic that the development of rational expectations, a development
that in its early stages was used as a battering ram against Keynesian
economics, enables us to understand
the bootstraps and bubbles of Chapter 12 Keynes with much greater
depth and clarity than we could before.
The determination of the present not by the past but by the unknown
future -- via expectations -- can never be grasped, with all its dramatically
modernist implications for our economic lives, as long as we reduce
expectations about the future, by means of an adaptive expectations scheme,
to some determinate function of the past.
Rational expectations -- honestly deployed -- can be a potent
generator of modernist outcomes: unfortunately, this is usually noted, if at
all, in the footnotes, where one finds the specious arguments for ignoring
all but the fundamental solutions covered in the main text.
It is
important to see that Keynes, despite twinges of pre-modern revulsion which
lead him to propose at one point, half-seriously, that we marry the asset to
the asset-holder for life, to defeat speculation and thus the melting of all
that is solid into air -- ultimately felt that bubbles could not be disposed
of so easily: “This is the inevitable result of investment markets
organised with a view to so-called liquidity.”16
Contemporary
thinkers who have carried on and developed Keynes' modernist views of asset
bubbles find the profession scarcely more receptive than it was and is to
Chapter 12. The pre-modernism of the profession lies very deep: Look, for one
example, at the vehemence of the reaction to Robert Shiller's
1981 article on Stock Market volatility, work directly in the tradition of
Chapter 12.17 In a
symposium on bubbles in the Journal of Economic Perspectives of a few
years back, we find one participant arguing quite seriously that the Great
Tulip Mania in 17th century Amsterdam--what Sadam
Hussein might have called the Mother of All Bubbles, on previous accounts --
can be parsimoniously explained as a response to changes in fundamentals!18
But I have
argued that modernism is pervasive in Keynes, not a phenomenon confined to a
chapter here or there. Here, I want to
suggest that we broaden our minds about the Keynesian message and remember,
above all that his work stands in two traditions simultaneously, both the
mainstream, and the underground, heretical tradition of underconsumption
theorists, numbering among its members thinkers such as Marx, Hobson, Major
Douglas and Malthus19 -- some of whom Keynes explicitly
acknowledges as progenitors in his appendices to the General Theory. The common vision of this latter tradition
is the one I have identified in Marx, of a modern capitalist economy subject to stagnation because its ability
to produce outruns its ability to consume: the modernist possibility of
production for production's sake is here taken very seriously indeed.
Moderns
and Pre-Moderns: Keynes, Robertson, and Our Grandchildren
The
modernist impulse in Keynes can be observed in the reaction it provoked in
his anti-modernist contemporaries. A
small but symptomatic incident provides an illustration. Keynes' theory of liquidity preference
contained the modernist idea that what determines the interest rate today is
speculator's expectations of what it will be tomorrow. This couldn't be the end of the story, D.
H. Robertson20 and others (Leontief,
famously) insisted: Where were the fundamentals of the process? Robertson's reaction was vehemently
anti-modernist:
Thus the rate
of interest is what it is because it is expected to become other than it is;
if it is not expected to become other than it is, there is nothing left to
tell us why it is what it is. The
organ which secretes it has been amputated, and yet it somehow still
exists--a grin without a cat.21
Robertson is
not alone among economists in thinking that to establish the bootstrap,
foundation-less character a theory attributes to an economic phenomenon is ipso
facto to refute that theory. Alice in Wonderland is one thing; reality
cannot have this airy character. If
your theory tells you it does, it must need work. As with under-consumption, I cite this
aspect of Keynes as an instance of his attraction to modernist
explanations. I don't mean to
condition my argument on an acceptance of the speculative demand for money
any more than on the acceptance of, say, Alvin Hansen's Keynesian Stagnationism.
There are contemporary theories of the interest rate which inherit
from Keynes the modernist form without the particular content he filled it
with.
Keynes
himself, like many another great modernist, combines his modernist
description with a deep anti-modernist revulsion at the prima facie
absurdity of the phenomena he is
transcribing and, in his weaker
moments, with what amounts to a pious hope for an overcoming of modernism and
a return to a pre-modern golden age where means have been put back in their
place as means to independent ends to which they are transparently related,
where bubbles have burst and social life, as it were, makes sense again.
(Berman, by the way finds some of these same tendencies in the arch-modernist
Marx, who seems sometimes to hold up a vision of socialism as a rest from the
ceaseless flux, an overcoming, indeed, of history, a putting-paid to the
ceaseless, permanent revolution of modern life.)
This
modernist/anti-modernist dialectic in Keynes is most apparent in his 1930
essay, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren"22,
where he contrasts the "purposiveness" of
contemporary economic life with its potential overcoming in the lives of our
grandchildren. The former idea
represents still another ringing in Keynes' work of the by now familiar
modernist changes. The purposive man,
he says:
is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his
acts by pushing his interest in them forward in time. He does not love his cat, but his cat's kittens; nor, in truth,
the kittens but only the kittens' kittens; and so on forward forever to the
end of cat-dom.
To him jam is not jam unless it is a case of jam tomorrow and never
jam today.23
But after
describing and dissecting this modernist purposiveness--interestingly
named since it seems almost paradigmatically anti-purposive to pre-modern
eyes--Keynes sounds an almost religious anti-modernism. The purposive era will one day end
("when science and the power of compound interest " have solved the
economic problem!). And in this future
made possible precisely by virtue of the abundance obtained through centuries
of purposiveness:
We shall once more value
ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honor
those who teach us to pluck the day virtuously and well, the delightful
people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of
the field, who toil not, neither do
they spin.24
But Keynes, unlike
the great majority of the economics profession in his day and our own, did
not allow his anti-modern hopes and values -- delusive or not -- to interfere
with his ability to limn the modernist reality in which we live and breathe.
The modernist present is highlighted and set off by the stark contrast with
the imagined anti-modernist future.
Keynes'
modernism is, I believe, the most deeply interesting and at the same time has
proven so far the least assimilable dimension of
his legacy to the economics profession.
L’Envoi
Taking the
contra-positive formulation of Nietzsche’s famous declaration, if everything
is not permitted, then God is not dead.
A determinist science, science that recoils from arbitrariness and
meaninglessness, that doesn’t permit, in principle, everything, that only counts as explanations the pre-modernist
subset – keeps God alive, and its adherents children.
Notes
1. Coase, Ronald, 1994. Essays on Economics and
Economists. University of Chicago Press, Chicago: 95-118.
2.
Ibid: 107.
3.
Ibid: 109.
4.
Miller, Geoffrey, 2000. The Mating
Mind. Doubleday, New York.
5.
Sigmund, Karl, 1993. Games of Life. Oxford University Press, New York:
128-31.
6.
Miller, op. cit: 58.
7.
Berman, Marshall,1982, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, Penguin
Books, New York.
8.
Keynes, J. M., 1965, The General Theory, Harbinger, New York.
9. Weill, Philipe,
1989."Animal Spirits and Increasing Returns.” American Economic Review: September.
10.
See Wallace, Neil, 1980. "Overlapping Generations Models of Fiat
Money" in Models of Monetary Economies. Federal Reserve Bank of
Minneapolis.
11.
Sigmund, op. cit.: 148, et seq. , on co-evolution.
12. Leijonhufvud, Axel, 1968. On Keynesian Economics and
The Economics of Keynes. Oxford University Press, London.
13.
Keynes, J. M., 1965, The General Theory, Harbinger, New York: 147-164.
14.
Keynes,1965, op.cit.,p.155.
15.
See Blanchard, Olivier and Stanley Fischer (1989), Lectures on
Macroeconomics, MIT Press, Cambridge, Chapter 5, for a good discussion of
this literature. Chapter 5 is titled "Multiple Equilibria,
Bubbles and Stability", and it sits uncomfortably in the text, an
apparent swerving away from the main track (which of course it is). The last
sentence of the chapter states ". . . though we find the phenomena
analyzed in this chapter both interesting and disturbing, we are willing to
proceed on the working assumption that the conditions need to generate stable
multiplicities of equilibria are not met in
practice". So it's goodbye to bubble solutions from then on. I wonder
how many syllabi in courses that use the text leave this chapter out?
16.
Ibid, emphasis added.
17. Shiller, Robert,(1989), Market Volatility, MIT
press, Cambridge, contains the original article along with Shiller's responses to the veritable cottage industry of
critics which grew in its wake. The article is "Do Stock Prices Move too
Much to be Justified by Subsequent Changes in Dividends", American
Economic Review 71 (1981): 421-35, and appears as Chapter 5 of Market
Volatility.
18.
Garber, Peter, (1990), "Famous First Bubbles", Journal of
Economic Perspectives 4: 35-54.
19.
See Bleaney, Michael, Underconsumption
Theories, (1976), International Publishers, New York, for an excellent
overview of this tradition.
20.
Robertson, D. H.,(1940), "Mr. Keynes and the Rate of Interest" in Essays
in Monetary Theory, Staples Press, London:1-38.
21.
Ibid.: 25.
22.
In Keynes, (1963), Essays in Persuasion, Norton, New York: 358-373.
23.
Ibid: 370.
24. Ibid: 372.
______________________________
SUGGESTED
CITATION:
Kevin Quinn, “Modernist and Pre-modernist
Explanation in Economics”, post-autistic economics review,
issue no. 24, 15 March 2004, article 3, http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue24/Quinn24.htm
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