Date: Fri, 10 Jan 1997 12:30:09 -0500 From: dhenwood-AT-panix.com (Doug Henwood) Subject: Re: M-I: John Roemer's Letter to The New Yorker At 10:53 AM 1/10/97, Justin Schwartz wrote: >But social conflict can be modelled mathematically. >Bowles and Gintis' "contexted exchange" model is a very impressive attempt >to do with within a broadlt Marxian framework. Contexted exchange? I assume this is a typo, and you're not going pomo on us, Justin, treating all social relations as discursive. I once sat in bored amazement and listened to Bowles, during a paper he presented at the New School, explain a regression variable - I think it was an epsilon - which was supposed to capture the fact that bosses have more negotiating power than workers. No shitski, comrade. And how do we measure this variable? Well we can't really, so we sorta guess. He spent a half an hour out of a 90-minute session on this all-important epsilon. Bowles's effort was part of an otherwise very interesting paper arguing that the increase in skills can't explain why pay rises with education. His point was that education either inculcates and/or is a proxy for self-discipline that managers value. Too bad he wasted a third of his time on epsilon; the rest of the talk was fascinating. Herbie "The Plumber" Gintis, by the way, would probably object to the label Marxian. (Gintis says that economists are mere technicians, like plumbers, and not architects of a better society.) But what B & G, as well as their UMass colleague Nancy Folbre, are doing lately is trying to out-geek the neoclassicals. Somehow they think that if they just come up with better models, they will sway the mainstream. Yeah right. As if it were the genius of their models that make bourgeois economists influential. Doug -- Doug Henwood Left Business Observer 250 W 85 St New York NY 10024-3217 USA +1-212-874-4020 voice +1-212-874-3137 fax email: <dhenwood-AT-panix.com> web: <http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/LBO_home.html> --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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