It is Weekend No. 7 and (as I have been doing for the past six weeks), I will now review Chapter 7 of "Visions of Inequality". It has become the most controversial part of the book b/c of its strong critique of lack of concern of neoclassical economics with income distribution.
It asks the Q: why were neoclassicists uninterested in income distribution? It provides three reasons: endogenous evolution of economics away from class structure to individual "agents" (that are all fundamentally identical); political reasons (the Cold War) and funding of the research by the rich.
It is important to realize (and very few people have) that the chapter opens up with a review of inequality studies in systems of state ownership of the means of production and makes an analogy between the denial of class structure in these societies and under capitalism; and thus why both were uninterested in studying income distribution.
No concern with class => no concern with inequality.
The most that neoclassical economics ever did in inequality studies was mere empiricism. Nothing else. No integrative study of inequality, no theories of how inequality is determined nor how it would evolve. It was in true sense what Marx called "vulgar political economy". One such example is Alan Blinder's "Theories of income distribution".
Studies that claimed to deal w/ income distribution were in effect what I call "incidental studies of income distribution". They belonged to trade or labor economics but not to income distribution. They *fundamentally* misunderstood why we study inequality.
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