An email to a colleague in Europe who is going off to the Congress on J.-B. Say and the entrepreneur at the end of August.
I am very pleased to hear from you and to find you are heading off to this Congress. It seems exceptionally interesting and the focus on the entrepreneur has been for too long ignored within economic theory and policy. There was some interest expressed to me about my going there as well but it has unfortunately come to nothing. It would have been a quite long journey and as I also have a conference in Hong Kong just after may have been too much of an excursion. But whatever might have been the original interest in my attendance, nothing has come of it so I am off to Hong Kong which will be a bit easier than the 20,000 mile round trip going to France would have required. Still, I would have liked to have gone but that’s life.
The seriously interesting part for me, but probably of little interest to anyone looking at what Say was writing in 1803, is that I have written what amounts to Say’s Treatise for the 21st century. I will attach a blog post I did on the book, but it is about nothing less than the crucial role of the entrepreneur combined with an understanding of Say’s Law as expressed by Say, Ricardo, James Mill and John Stuart Mill. I am the living embodiment of those values but probably 150 years behind the times, but in my view, also about 15-20 years before my time. The fact of this conference is a sign of the subterranean changes going on. But it is hard for anyone who has grown up on aggregate demand and math ec to understand what’s required if you remove AD from within macro and start treating the future as genuinely uncertain. What happens then is you end up with the classical theory of the cycle which no one any longer understands. You should be able to read the back cover of the text in the blog post attached which explains all this in more detail.
I should also mention one other reason I was pleased to hear from you. Had you not written, I would not have known that my post to the SHOE website had actually been posted since it drew not a single response and google mail doesn’t post returned emails that one has sent out oneself. My campaign to save HET from the historians and philosophers of science seems to fall on deaf ears, but the more I engage in this debate, the most astonished I am at how misconceived their ideas are. Sure certain aspects of HET are HaPoS but that is not anywhere near HET’s core significance. I really do believe that HET has been overrun by philosophers and sociologists who have almost no interest in economic issues other than as a peripheral matter upon which they can contemplate everything else under the sun aside from the way an economy works. I think that because HET in Australia retains its original essence almost entirely, that the shifts that are going on elsewhere were almost invisible to us when they came to try to remove HET from economics which is why we all rose up as one. Now with conferences such as this in Boulogne-sur-Mer, where the central interest is mainly in understanding how economies function but using past economists as a vehicle, there may be a shift back coming into play. My intervention to preserve HET, however much it seems to have been resented by some of our American and European colleagues, was just in time. Had HET gone to HaPoS, it would have died within the decade within departments of economics. It would have become as relevant to economics as the history of physics is to physicists.
Finally, I am going to copy into this email my young colleague from Auchy so he can know what’s going on. I hope you enjoy the conference which I hope will be a great success and please do keep me informed.
Kind regards
Law of Markets 