by From Lars Syll I claim that Sraffian economics, however rigorous in its use of the simultaneous equations method … is irrelevant to our understanding of the real world and, judging by its failure to draw any policy implications, is largely irrelevant to the major concerns of modern economists … This is not a judgment based simply on my opinion, which is ultimately no better than yours. Relevance is not a matter for individual opinion but a social judgment of the community of professional economists. We assess that judgment by inspecting the professional literature, by citation counts, or by any of the other methods of bibliometrics … Show me a piece of research grounded in Sraffian economics and its principal method of long-period analysis that deals with poverty, inequality,
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from Lars Syll
I claim that Sraffian economics, however rigorous in its use of the simultaneous equations method … is irrelevant to our understanding of the real world and, judging by its failure to draw any policy implications, is largely irrelevant to the major concerns of modern economists … This is not a judgment based simply on my opinion, which is ultimately no better than yours. Relevance is not a matter for individual opinion but a social judgment of the community of professional economists. We assess that judgment by inspecting the professional literature, by citation counts, or by any of the other methods of bibliometrics … Show me a piece of research grounded in Sraffian economics and its principal method of long-period analysis that deals with poverty, inequality, deflation, etcetera, and I have lost the argument. I have been unable to locate any such papers …
At one end of the spectrum, we have highly rigorous but totally irrelevant theories, such as general equilibrium theory and, I contend, Sraffian economics. At the other end, we have not very rigorous but highly relevant theories, such as public choice theory and evolutionary and/or institutional economics, and in between we have the hard-to-classify theories, such as game theory …
Sraffians … spend their time finding logical flaws in the models of their enemies rather than building platforms for illuminating the workings of an economy. They are formalists pure and simple, making a fetish of the form of theories at the neglect of strengthening their content. They simply cannot resist what Nancy Cartwright (1999) calls “the vanity of rigour in economics.”