1993 Articles

Post Walrasian and Post Marxian Economics

Stiglitz, Joseph E.

It is widely believed that the failure of the socialist experiment should have had a devastating effect on radical economics. Yet radical economics is not only alive and well, but flourishing, as the paper by Bowles and Gintis demonstrates. Years before the official demise of Marxist-socialism, they had broadened their critique of standard economics well beyond the received Marxist literature. Indeed, their arguments offered striking parallels with the mainstream critiques of Walrasian economics provided by the newly developing strand of thought which, for brevity, I shall refer to as "information economics."