Review 21 -- No Title

Mainstream, neoclassical economics insists on the positive-normative dichotomy, but is necessarily suffused with values. It also adopts the trappings of a mechanistic, scientific realism and determinism, but the economy is a discretionary process subject to social control which is part of the process itself. The economy produces goods but also people, and produces both on the basis of institutions which represent value prescriptions and social control. Both the economy and economics, therefore, already incorporate values and embody or participate in a larger social valuational process. All of this is consistent with the general institutionalist view (and with the view of Frank H. Knight as well) that both the economy and the social valuadonal process are more than the market.