Mainstream economics dismissed dissenting figures for lacking mathematical rhetoric

Evidence

Deepak Lal, whose writings on development echo many of the themes championed by Bauer, addressed the question of Bauer’s standing among development economists in his contribution to a 1987 issue of the Cato Journal devoted to Bauer’s work. Attributing Bauer’s marginalization to a conflict between the “Weltanschaung” of Austrian economics, with which Bauer’s work is identified, and that of mainstream economics, Lal laments the methodological narrowness of the latter, which proceeds from “an epistemologically unsound positivist view of economics as a science” and leads many to dismiss the work of figures, like Bauer, who fail to express their findings within the field’s dominant rhetoric of mathematics. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1772

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader history of economics’ mathematical turn and the positivist epistemology debates around Milton Friedman’s methodology. — connects to: Mainstream economics maintains hegemony because it offers tools and language no alternative matches. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 54; Economic heterodoxy declined because graduate training filtered out non-economists — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 64; Krugman blamed economists’ crisis blindness on aesthetic attachment to math — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 449 (+3 more)