Keynesianism was examined by Roemer in his Newtonian Economics for the sake of demonstrating the folly of modeling indubitably dynamic systems by anything other than the standard dynamics used successfully throughout the engineering disciplines.

According to SFEcon’s central prejudice, a science calling itself economics should be able to make continuous account of how physical resources and money come to be distributed among economic sectors. We cannot imagine how such an account might be realized unless it is through a continuous re-specification of the physical rates of exchange among the sectors and of the prices at which these distributions occur. And we certainly would not expect anyone to even glance at our ideas about economic causation until those ideas have been successfully embodied in a series of mechanical analogs.

We impose this last stricture on ourselves out of respect for the limits of human cognition, i.e.: we simply do not accept the claims of those who foretell the behaviors of complex, non-linear dynamic systems by merely propounding schematics for the system’s operations. Unless a schematic can realized in the same time-space continuum as the system it represents, it should fail the minimal test for acceptance. Putative analogs must exhibit their intrinsic behaviors before they can be compared to real processes; and we do not accept ‘behaviors’ that are merely imputed to complicated schematics that have not been realized in formal dynamic emulators.

Heterodoxy’s reply has been to the effect that the SFEcon crew is not sufficiently adept at dynamics to be part of the conversation. If we were, we would no doubt have been persuaded by heterodoxy’s findings as to the inadequacy of neoclassicism’s iconic specifiers of economic behavior, most notably the cost curve. We will nonetheless take up a discussion of the cost curve if only to offer specifics as to where our ignorance might be corrected, and offer a brief catalogue of the objections already received.