Warren J. Samuels (1933-2011)

This paper examines the research and career of the late Warren J. Samuels (1933-2011), an influential institutionalist economist in the Wisconsin John Commons tradition and well-known historian and methodologist of economics. It discusses four main positions Samuels developed and held regarding the history of economic thought as intellectual history, the theory of economic policy, methodological pluralism, and the invisible hand doctrine. Among the views considered are: his matrix approach to meaningfulness, his characterization of intellectual systems, his emphasis on the centrality of the social order, his theory of economic policy as a neglected subject, his discourse analysis of language, his emphasis on the hermeneutic circle and critique of foundationalism, and argument that the invisible hand lacks ontological and epistemological credentials and functions as a means of social control and psychic balm. Much of the discussion is cast in terms of Samuels’ own reflections on what he believed is involved in being an historian of economics

(WP 2020-01) The Sea Battle Tomorrow: The Identity of Reflexive Economic Agents

This paper develops a conception of reflexive economic agents as an alternative to the standard utility conception, and explains individual identity in terms of how agents adjust to change in a self-organizing way, an idea developed from Herbert Simon. The paper distinguishes closed equilibrium and open process conceptions of the economy, and argues the former fails to explain time in a before-and-after sense in connection with Aristotle’s sea battle problem. A causal model is developed to represent the process conception, and a structure-agency understanding of the adjustment behavior of reflexive economic agents is illustrated using Merton’s self-fulfilling prophecy analysis. Simon’s account of how adjustment behavior has stopping points is then shown to underlie how agents’ identities are disrupted and then self-organized, and the identity analysis this involves is applied to the different identity models of Merton, Ross, Arthur, and Kirman. Finally, the self-organization idea is linked to the recent ‘preference purification’ debate in bounded rationality theory regarding the ‘inner rational agent trapped in an outer psychological shell,’ and it is argued that the behavior of self-organizing agents involves them taking positions toward their own individual identities

Sraffa and Keynes: Differences and Shared Preconceptions

The relationship between the thinking and work of Sraffa and Keynes is complex and controversial. This paper approaches it initially through an investigation of their respective interpretations of their predecessors, the classical economics and Marshall. Keynes is argued to have misinterpreted the classicals on Say\u27s Law largely on account of his having accepting Marshall\u27s continuity conception of the relation of classical to neoclassical economics. Sraffa\u27s understanding of classical economics as being rooted in a different conception of value and distribution is opposed to Keynes\u27s view. Yet though the two differed at this fundamental level, an argument can be made for saying they agreed that economic analysis needs to be embedded in social contexts identified in terms of relatively distinct historical periods. This argument is developed in the second half of this paper in terms of the philosophical views of Gramsci and Wittgenstein. An important conclusion is that distinct historical periods exhibit interconnected and relatively settled states of affairs across social and economic life. This gives some justification for treating both Sraffa and Keynes in long-period terms, if this framework is understood in the language of propensities and average practices

(WP 2019-01) Stratification Economics as an Economics of Exclusion

Stratification Economics (SE) is an emergent sub-field in economics, but its JEL classification misrepresents its content and its relationship to the whole of economics. This paper first develops a more accurate characterization of SE by identifying its differences with Mainstream Economics (ME), its commonalities with economics in a broad sense, and how the combination of these differences and commonalities define it as a distinct research program. It then applies this definition to an economic goods taxonomy that makes a distinction between local public goods and common pool goods to interpret SE’S distinct research program as an economics of exclusion. The paper closes with a discussion of how SE might explain socioeconomic change in social group identity terms