Abstract
This chapter draws the main conclusions from, and reflects on, the research presented throughout the book. Suggestions for future work are also proposed.
I would like to use this occasion to give further impetus to the re-incorporation of income distribution into the main body of economic analysis.
Anthony Barnes Atkinson
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Notes
- 1.
A representative agent has welfare significance only if lump-sum redistribution of endowments is possible (Atkinson and Stiglitz 2015) .
- 2.
As already Marshall (1920, pp. 448–449) pointed out, economics has no near kinship with any physical science: “It is true that the forces with which economics deals have one advantage for deductive treatment in the fact that their method of combination is [\(\ldots \)] that of mechanics rather than of chemistry. [\(\ldots \)] But even in mechanics long chains of deductive reasoning are directly applicable only to the occurrences of the laboratory. By themselves they are seldom a sufficient guide for dealing with the heterogeneous materials and the complex and uncertain combination of the forces of the real world. For that purpose they need to be supplemented by specific experience, and applied in harmony with, and often in subordination to, a ceaseless study of new facts, a ceaseless search for new inductions”.
- 3.
“[\({\ldots }\)] The matter with which the chemist deals is the same always: but economics, like biology, deals with a matter, of which the inner nature and constitution, as well as the outer form, are constantly changing” (Marshall 1920, p. 449) .
- 4.
Econometrics seemed to possess the methodology that makes it possible to discover “scientific” laws of economics, similarly to the analysis of observational data in astronomy. Unfortunately, it has not been so: empirical research in econometric studies—mainly conducted by the econometric branch of mainstream economics—has widely scrutinized economic data to develop advanced techniques of mathematical statistics for testing hypotheses (e.g. normality of the errors, linear relationships, representative agent) without any significant contribution to economic theory. But this has not prevented mainstream economics to be regarded as “scientific”, because of its willingness to consider empirical evidence. This created a scientific appearance (“illusion”) for mainstream economics, elevated its status and enhanced its influence (Summers 1991) .
- 5.
This principle is examined in detail in Sect. A.6 of Appendix A.
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Clementi, F., Gallegati, M. (2016). Conclusions. In: The Distribution of Income and Wealth. New Economic Windows. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27410-2_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27410-2_6
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