[escepticos] Economía y clases sociales (atención David)

[Pedro J. Hdez]

Este párrafo del libro Debunking Economics me ha resultado interesante

Classical economists such as Smith, Ricardo and Marx divided society
into social classes, and considered how different policies might favor
one social class over another. The notion of class has been expunged
from economics by the concept of the indifference curve and its ‘one
size fits all’ treatment of everyone from the poorest Somali to the
richest American. Yet because the preferences of different individuals
cannot be meaningfully aggregated, this concept is invalid for the
analysis of anything more than an isolated individual.

But the conditions under which aggregation is valid – when tastes are
identical and unaffected by changes in income – are at least
reasonable as first approximations when the analysis splits society
into different social classes. It is not too unreasonable to lump all
workers, all landlords, and all capitalists together, as Smith,
Ricardo and Marx used to do. Incomes within a class vary substantially
less than incomes between classes, and tastes are far more likely to
be common within classes than between them. A model with both Robinson
Crusoe and Friday is at least slightly more reasonable than a model
with Robinson Crusoe alone.

Leading mathematical economists have made very similar musings to
this. Alan Kirman made one of the strongest such statements in his
provocatively titled paper ‘The intrinsic limits of modern economic
theory: the emperor has no clothes.’ After discussing these and other
theoretical failures of neoclassical economics, Kirman concluded that

If we are to progress further we may well be forced to theories in
terms of groups who have collectively coherent behavior. Thus demand
and expenditure functions if they are to be set against reality must
be defined at some reasonably high level of aggregation. The idea that
we should start at the level of the isolated individual is one which
we may well have to abandon. (Kirman 1989: 138)


In the end, then, the one benefit of neoclassical economics may be to
have established why classical economists were correct to reason in
terms of social class in the first place.


saludos

-- 
Pedro J. Hernández
http://ecos.blogalia.com
@ecosdelfuturo