Léon Walras

You know, there weren't really even distinct schools of thought very much anymore.

Most people agreed on the, the essence of economics, uh, and that was based on, you know, the new marginal utility theory from Menger and, uh, Jevons and Walras and others who, uh, who developed it.

So Fetter is kind of critiquing this view in a way and saying, actually, despite all the good work that people like Menger and the others did, they hadn't really thoroughly revolutionized economics.

Their ideas hadn't fully taken hold, and in fact, there were many ideas in economics in Fetter's time, and even to some extent today in the 21st century, that you can still trace back to ideas from the classical economists and, in particular, some of their, uh, some of their, their, uh, bad ideas, um, related to, for example, cost of production or labor theories of value and-

And that narrative that insists on the marginalist revolution in the 1870s as a kind of breaking point.

So the standard story is that Carl Menger, William Jevons, Leon Walras, they reasoned that the margin and that consumers demand good up to the point where the marginal utility is equal to its price and the price is determined by the intersection of demand and supply and value is nothing but the market price.

These are standard elements of neoclassical marginalist economics that emerges in the 1870s.

We're not challenging those results in a sense, but what we're challenging is the idea that this would be the main narrative about the evolution from classical to neoclassical economics.

China has a Marxist foundation.

They don't swallow the same bullshit that Western economists do, Marshall and Walras and so on.

So there's more realism amongst the Marxists in China than there is amongst the neoclassicals in the rest of the world.

Let's look forward then.

Yes, creative disruption, Schumpeter's gear, right.

And it's interesting because underneath this story, there's also discussion about economists because Pareto, Walras, they were part of this Lausanne School of Economics, the Marginist Revolution, which... which Corey Robin has written about, right? This idea, well, their main idea is the law of supply and demand.

That is how economics works.

Schubert completely disagreed with that.