The radicals make “strong assertions,” and I don’t find warrant for them,” Robert Dorfman, Wells Professor of Economics, commented. “It’s not that I disbelieve them – I have no grounds for either accepting or rejecting them,” he said.

James S. Duesenberry, charman of the Department, feels essentially the same about the radicals’ conclusions. He divides the radicals’ work into two parts – the empirical work, such as Bowles has done on the effects of class background, I.Q., and education on income, and the “commentary and interpretation of the social and political forces at work – how these results came about. Usually it has something to do with why it is advantageous to some groups to have these results come about.”

In considering Bowles for tenure, Duesenberry said, “there was no minus for that political commentary, as far as I was concerned.” But, as someone who does think economists should devote more attention to what he calls the “interface” between economics, sociology and political science, Duesenberry thought the more important question was whether Bowles was “the best we can get” of the people doing empirical work in this area.

To most of the Department’s mathematical theoreticians, there is no point to economists even asking these socio-political questions, no matter how important they might be. In their view, economists have to limit themselves to dealing with the kinds of questions which their methodology fits them for. This is not an ideological choice, in their view, but a practical one.

The possible shortcomings that can result from limiting economics in this way are, perhaps, best illustrated in the area of welfare economics, in which Gintis has done some of the most important radical work. Conventional economists measure welfare by the system’s ability to meet people’s preferences for goods and services. But, if people’s preferences are shaped by the system – particularly, if the system trains them to measure their own welfare in terms of individual consumption rather than such “goods” as community and meaningful work – the conventional way of measuring the system’s efficacy becomes somewhat questionable.

“The conventional practitioners of welfare economics are aware that wants are of affected by the system, by the whole culture,” Abram Bergson, Baker Professor of Economics and a conventional welfare economist, said of this problem. (Bergson also specializes in the economics of socialism.)

“Pigou, one of the founders of modern welfare economics…recognizing that, in raising the real income of the ordinary guy, it may be that there will be contrary changes in personality,” Bergson said. His “presumption”, however, was that raising real income would generally increase, not decrease, overall welfare, Bergson said.

That presumption might not be correct, Bergson commented, but, he said, Gintis does not answer the question: what should the economist do about it? “That economic systems produce not only goods and services but people – that would generally be agreed. Merely stating that fact is not very novel. The question is, how do you take that into account?” he said. So far, Gintis and the other radical economists have not answered that question, he said.

To the radicals, the criticism that they have not yet answered the questions that they have raised is unfair, considering the relative amounts of time which have gone into the development of the radical and conventional approaches. Because of the historical unwillingness of American universities to appoint Marxists, it is only natural that the conventional approach to economics is much more highly developed, they feel.

During the discussion of Bowles’s tenure in the Department, Marglin asked that Harvard give radical economics a chance to develop further – by promoting Bowles, who, with Gintis, has done some of the most important work in refining the radical approach.

At least a few tenured members of the Department are willing to give radical economics a chance – among them, three past or present presidents of the American Economic Association, Wassily Leontief, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Kenneth J. Arrow, 1972 Nobel laureate in economics

These three are in the small group of senior professors who supported Bowles’s bid for tenure. (Arrow stressed that he supported Bowles for a combination of reasons: he though Bowles’s appointment would broaden the Department and he felt Bowles’s work was “good enough” judged by standards that “hardly had anything to do with radicalism.”) .

Whether the Department’s re-appointment of Gintis represented a real or token commitment to radical economics is uncertain. This is especially true in view of Duesenberry’s explanation of how Gintis, who was overwhelmingly defeated for re-appointment three years ago, was re-hired: because Gintis’s appointment was to be an untenured one, members of the Department felt they had little to lose by appointing him and letting the radicals’ senior faculty supporters who had been repeated “losers”, win this time. At any rate, there was much less at stake than in the making of a tenured appointment.

It remains to be seen whether Harvard’s conventional economists will continue to pass over radical economists on the grounds that they ask important but unanswerable questions or whether they will make a long term commitment to this alternative world view and approach.

Gintis is not remaining at Harvard to find out. This Spring, the University of Massachusetts in Amherst lured him away. In a dramatic step, UMass offered tenure to four radical economists at once. Gintis and Bowles were two of them.

The two will remain at Harvard one more year. When they leave, only one radical, Marglin, will remain among Harvard’s 60-odd economists. The concentration of strength in radical economics has clearly shifted westward in Massachusetts. Meanwhile, Harvard preserves economic Veritas, narrowly defined.