The Principles of Economics: Some Lies My Teachers Told Me.

• Author: McRae, Larry T.

Many economists, including some of the profession's luminaries, have dabbled in methodology, either to explicate their own views of appropriate method or simply from curiosity. Lawrence Boland, however, has chosen to make methodology the central object of his research. This book is a compendium of his findings, some new and some previously presented elsewhere. The author intends the book's unifying theme to be ". . . an examination of the ways one can try to criticize neoclassical theory." The "lies" of the subtitle are a set of propositions, perpetrated variously by critics or defenders of neoclassicism, which Boland regards as erroneous: that the assumption of maximization is a tautology, that models of imperfect competition can be constructed by relaxing the assumption of price-taking behavior, and so on.

In this book Boland strikes some chords to which one can easily resonate: he believes we've learned little since Alfred Marshall's time, that it would be nice if we could wind economic theory back to the 1930s and start over, and that ". . . there is a lot of silly philosophy underlying ordinary neoclassical economics. . . ." The book also contains some interesting discussions, most notably that of Marshall's concept of time in economics. For the prospective reader, however, the question must be whether there is enough of interest to justify spending the time it takes to read the book. This reviewer did not find the interest/cost ratio favorable. For every intriguing aside there is a passage like this: ". . . individualism is distinguished from holism and psychologism is distinguished from institutionalism . . . in addition to psychologistic individualism and institutional individualism . . . there are two versions of holism: psychologistic holism and institutional holism." Besides this unfortunate prose style, there is the more important question of what, exactly, Boland's investigations are supposed to accomplish.

The most obvious reason to study economists' methods, rather than the subject matter of economics, is to improve the practice of economics; another reason might be that the variations and development of research methods are, in their own right, an interesting part of intellectual history. Boland professes neither of these goals and, indeed, contributes to neither; his avowed purpose is simply to understand neoclassical economics. I might then read this book to understand Boland's understanding of neoclassical economics; the...