File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-01-11.141, message 88


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

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