Microeconomics: A Critical Companion

by Ben Fine

The culmination of forty years of teaching, researching, and advising on political economy, Ben Fine’s Microeconomics offers a clear and concise exposition of mainstream microeconomics from a heterodox perspective. Covering topics from consumer and producer theory to general equilibrium to perfect competition, it sets the emergence and evolution of microeconomics in both its historical and interdisciplinary context. Fine critically exposes the methodological and conceptual content of dominant microeconomic models without sacrificing the technical detail required for those completing a first degree in economics or entering postgraduate study. The result is a book which is sure to establish a strong presence on undergraduate reading lists and in comparative literature on the subject.

Genres: Economics

224 pages, Hardcover

First published April 15, 2016

Reviews

[Matthijs Krul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ben Fine insists that this is not a textbook in heterodox or mainstream microeconomics, and he is right. 'Companion' means precisely what it says. This book is a thematic discussion of major topics in mainstream microeconomics (demand, supply, production functions, the labour market, etc) with exposition of the deductive arguments for the orthodox viewpoint and critical, often sardonic, commentary pointing out its theoretical and practical shortcomings. It is in that respect more comparable to other critical guides of this type, such as Hill & Myatt's "Anti-Textbook", than to any overview of either orthodox or heterodox microeconomics as such.

It usefully starts at the most fundamental level, the core of the theory as one would normally find it in most undergraduate economics classes. It is this core of the neoclassical approach that Fine systematically exposes for its dubious assumptions, its elisions between justification and use, its incoherence, its lack of empirical meaning or applicability, and its methodological individualism (one particular point of criticism Fine has made throughout his career). But since it is essentially a brief set of critical notes based around the postwar 'consensus', one should expect a fairly fast and abstract discussion of the orthodox viewpoint itself and a reasonable amount of algebra. Fortunately, Fine does at each stage make sufficiently explicit the implications both of the methodological presuppositions of each component of orthodox microeconomics and of the criticisms he levels at them.

This book is, I think, therefore most useful as a handy overview of what the actual justifications of the orthodox methods are and their limitations, especially applicable to the many cases in which these methods are invoked despite their subject-matter going well beyond those limits. For more extensive discussions of the origins and development of neoclassical economics and the character of its more recent diffusion as 'economics imperialism', Fine and Dimitris Milonakis' earlier works are recommended.

[Matthias]

I learned a few things from Ben Fine's "Microeconomics: A Critical Companion," but the main one is: I have allowed a lot of my undergraduate microeconomics, the kind criticized in detail here, go rusty. That's a shame (though a good wake-up call), because this is a analysis that's very much internal to the mathematical logic of microeconomics framework, an "immanent critique," as they say. Thus, I'll have to read this, and its companion volume on macroeconomics, again later after doing some necessary review.

That said, abstracting from the particular critiques of particular models and all of their mathematical details, Fine tells the same story over and over again, enough that even a dumbass like me can remember it. Fine largely rejects the notion that neoclassical economics is, or (outside of a few historical episodes) has been, driven by anything like "market fundamentalism" - as he observes, neoclassical economists are willing to consider cases of market failures - and even minimizes the influence of outside political forces on the discipline more generally. What drives neoclassicism, in this telling, is primarily internal to its own logic - a theoretical "implosion" that reduced the entire approach to a "theoretical apparatus" (nearly formally equivalent production and utility functions) and "theoretical architecture" (targeting these towards efficiency and equilibrium.) With some dubious but easily-ignored assumptions, this architecture and apparatus forms a Procrustean bed on which nearly any hapless social phenomenon can be stretched, leading to the topical "explosion" of disciplinary imperialism.

Within each topic (production functions, labor markets, and so on) Fine argues that the required bridging assumptions break the realism of the whole thing rather than merely simplifying, though that ultimately seems like an empirical question that would require more treatment than can be given in this short, dense volume. His recommendations, likewise, mostly concern building more targeted and less general models from scratch; expanding on this is necessarily another thing that is out of scope for a volume of this size.

Regardless, one rotten egg to me for letting my knowledge lapse, possibly one golden laurel to Fine for his critiques, and one book for me to re-read as I go back over an intermediate Micro textbook.

[José · Rating 3 out of 5]

está bien