Buchanan’s Legacy

Abstract

The tools are in the saddle. The economist is not. As long ago as 1948, reviewing Samuelson’s Foundations of Economic Analysis when it first appeared, Kenneth Boulding (1948: 199) complained of ‘rapidly diminishing marginal productivity in the application of mathematics to economics’: ‘It may well be that the slovenly literary borderland between economics and sociology will be the most fruitful building ground during the years to come and that mathematical economics will remain too flawless in its perfection to be very fruitful’. Later on, at the very time that the students were revolting, Galbraith (1965: 38) was reiterating the message that the ‘slovenly’ was well suited to the ‘grubby’ and that the neoclassical mainstream was tuning out because reality was a bore: ‘It would be a mistake to identify complexity with completeness and sophistication with wisdom’. Still later it was the turn of Piketty (2014: 32): ‘The discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences’. The heterodox knew that the orthodox held the commanding heights of path dependence, intellectual inertia, professional advancement and vested interest. They nonetheless believed that even a minority ought to make a stand.