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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 May 2010
Is there a future for institutional economics? Myrdal is confident that there is, as he wrote:
‘I foresee that within the next ten or twenty years the now fashionable highly abstract analysis of conventional economists will lose out. Though its logical basis is weak – it is founded on utterly unrealistic, poorly scrutinised, and rarely even explicitly stated assumptions – its decline will be mainly an outcome of tremendous changes which, with crushing weight, are falling upon us’.
I am inclined to agree with him. Firstly, in contrast to the somewhat imperious attitude of abstract economic theorists typified by John Eatwell's remark to the effect that ‘if the world is not like the model, so much the worse for the world’, institutional economists set store, above all, on the empirical studies of the subject matter – our society in its manifold aspects – which undergoes evolutionary changes in the course of historical development. In a sense, most typical in this respect was Wesley Mitchell, about whom Albert B. Wolfe wrote:
Mitchell's Veblenian institutionalism seems to boil down to substantially this: that men in the mass, at any given time and in any given culture-complex, behave in certain standardized ways, according to uniform but not simple patterns; these patterns undergo an evolutionary drift which can be roughly measured by the statistical device of time series and which with adequate empirical analysis is amenable to some degree of rational control and direction.
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