I don't know if Fredrick Lavington actually had a cat. SchrΓΆdinger's was certainly imaginary.

In my earlier travels around the subject of methodology and the history of ideas, many interesting parallels appeared with the state of economics. At much the same time the balance between the poets and the mathematicians in the economics profession was changing again, that time pretty much forever. I remember that the late Geoff Harcourt had repeatedly pinned a quote from Marshall to the Cambridge Faculty notice board lamenting the lack of poets in the profession... remarkable considering Marshall's own mathematical background.

An economic "uncertainty principle" means there is a constant need to bring the formal model back to reality, even without large exogenous shocks. The need for empirical coherence forces models into a hybrid mode and away from a pure theoretical coherence. Alvin Hansen remarked on this in 1949: "The social sciences appear to be so complex, that the more we know, the less sure we are that what we know is tolerably reliable, especially for policy decisions."1

Fredrick Lavington was, perhaps, most famous for saying "It's all in Marshall" with the caveat that you had to look quite carefully sometimes! Lavington could tease out some of the failures of the supposedly self-righting neoclassical orthodoxy, and still see it as being within the Marshallian Tradition. More recently the late Mark Hayes' fascinating retrospective view of Keynes's General Theory says much the same thing2. So I have named this small site with that in mind.

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  1. ↩︎  p.254, Hansen, A.H. (1949) 'Wesley Mitchell, Social Scientist and Social Counselor' The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Nov., 1949), pp. 245-255.
  2. ↩︎  Hayes, M.G. (2006) The Economics of Keynes, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar
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