There is a “sponginess” to neoclassical economics that enables it to absorb divergent elements around it without ever emphasizing their main points. These fringe ideas become footnotes to which theorists can refer as evidence that they have taken the ideas into account.#
While it may not be appealing to assume that individuals make errors that they themselves could have predicted (ex ante error), it is not obviously wrong to suppose that others could have predicted the errors of the first group. Any act of entrepreneurship or speculation involves trying to outguess the market, to do better than the crowd or the median asset-holder. Entrepreneurs and speculators are constantly taking actions that assume that most people make “predictable” errors (predictable by entrepreneurs).#
Data on forecasts that were correct, ex post, tell us little about the optimality or rationality of these forecasts.#
The mutual determination of prices is a characteristic of general equilibrium, not a method of attaining that equilibrium.#
The marginal utility of money depends on its exchange value, the reverse of the ordinary relationship for goods.#
Any attempt to impute economic meaning to the period of time between the objectively defined original factors and the resulting consumption activity will be in vain.#
A given stage [of production] does not correspond to a particular industry or even to a particular, objectively defined, collection of capital goods.#
It is a misnomer to speak of “calculating” the benefits and costs of intervention, when the evident effect of such intervention is interference with the market’s calculational procedures.#
Were individuals to know enough to rationalize a rule, they would generally know enough to abandon it.#
The existence of purely speculative markets requires the divergence of expectations.#
Neoclassical economics conflates the plan with the process of planning, the completed act with the process of acting.#
Creativity can exist only within a framework that provides at least some degree of predictability.#