[From Bruce Gregory (970310.0805 EST)]
I am reading Robert Kuttner's new book _Everything for Sale:
The Virtues and Limits of Markets_. It is an edifying example
of what happens when an discipline becomes so enamored of a
model that it sees everything in terms of that model. It also is a
cautionary tale of how easy it then becomes to ignore evidence
that calls the assumptions of that model into question. (If all
of this sounds familiar, that has not been lost on me...)
One might argue that the strengths of economic models
resides in the fact that they recognize that human beings act
purposefully, and the weakness of the same models arises
from the fact that they have so narrow a view of what those
purposes are.
Bruce Gregory