Description
Book SynopsisThis work on microeconomics offers interpretations of both its strengths and its weaknesses. It shows how the general equilibrium ideas of Walras and Marshall were gradually transformed after 1930 into formalized accounts of imaginary economies where trading never occurs.
Trade Review’In this book, Dr Costa has made a substantial addition to the literature that establishes the absence of economic foundations for current general equilibrium models. He rightly emphasizes the lack in them of an account of the behavior of decentralized markets like those which predominate in reality, and indicates respects in which the theoretical formulation of such markets can be undertaken. The book will be profitably studied by students and professors of economics alike.’ -- Donald A. Walker, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, US
’Manuel Costa’s General Equilibrium Analysis and the Theory of Markets
offers a stealth-like rather than a frontal attack on contemporary microtheory. In it, he painstakingly describes how the general equilibrium ideas of Walras and Marshall - both aimed at describing adjustment processes in real – world markets - were gradually transformed after 1930 into formalized accounts of imaginary economies where trading never occurs even though a central ‘coordinator’ is presumed to oversee the meshing of transistor trading plans and the establishment of ‘competitive equilibrium’ trading prices! The beauty of Costa’s ‘stealth’ approach is its evenhandedness: it offers the same deep understanding of the strengths as of the weaknesses of contemporary microeconomics. Costa’s book thus can be read with as much pleasure and profit - and food for productive thought - by devotees as by opponents of received doctrine.’ -- Robert W. Clower, University of South Carolina, US, Brasenose College, Oxford, UK and University of California, Los Angeles, US
Table of ContentsContents: 1. Introduction 2. Walras’s Program and the Neowalrasian Diversion 3. How Standard Price Theory Became Predominantly Neowalrasian 4. On Markets 5. An Afterthought: How Elusive is the Construction of a General Model of Decentralized Exchange? Appendix References
