[OPE-L:4988] Re: RE: Reply to Andrew on "Proof"

From: Steve Keen (s.keen@uws.edu.au)
Date: Tue Feb 20 2001 - 07:49:43 EST


There's one point in Andrew's reply which I can't let past: that's the jibe
that ROPE is suppressing "temporalist research".

I defy anyone to describe my 1998 ROPE article--which was directly critical
of Sraffian economics--as anything other than "temporalist research". ROPE
will publish temporalist research when their referees believe it is of a
sufficient quality.

This is not to say that ROPE's referees are necessarily well qualified to
make that judgment--few economists have the necessary training in the
mathematics of dynamical systems in the first instance, and ROPE's referees
are more likely to come from a group which is trained in linear algebra
rather than differential equations. Andrew's papers *could* have been
wrongly rejected for this reason.

However, for the reasons given in my comment on Allin's post, I regard TSS
as poor quality temporalist research. I am inclined to believe that this is
why ROPE's referees recommended rejecting Allin's papers--whether or not
they were the best possible judges of that.

Steve
>Yes, of course, it is all about politics under the surface or, in
>my case, on the surface -- like the man said, disdain to conceal
>our aims, etc.  The weird thing is that Mongiovi and his fellow
>physicalist suppressers at the RRPE make these political
>denunciations, but ALSO try to deny that their suppression of
>temporalist research is political!  (One reason for this is that
>the RRPE has an official policy against exclusion on political
>grounds.  So they pretend that their exclusion of temporalist work
>on "theoretical" and "methodological" grounds isn't political.
>Talk about empty distinctions.)  So in one breath, Mongiovi calls
>us vulgar economists because we don't believe that value is a veil
>or that Marx would have written Das Körn instead of Das Kapital if
>only he had been able to do matrix algebra.  In the next breath,
>Mongiovi plays dumb when he gets to Ted McGlone and I saying that
>our purpose is to combat an ideological attack on Marx's body of
>ideas.  How, Mongiovi asks oh-so-innocently, does pointing out
>some "technical errors" the man made constitute an ideological
>attack?

Dr. Steve Keen
Senior Lecturer
Economics & Finance
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School of Economics and Finance
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