Bibliographic record
Abstract
I draw attention to an economic theory discovered in the 1930’s by the Canadian scholar Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984). At the time, Lonergan was unable to find an economist to read his manuscripts. Eventually, however, his results were published in For a New Political Economy (Lonergan 1998); and Macroeconomic Dynamics: An Essay in Circulation Analysis (Lonergan, 1999), volumes 21 and 15 of the Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan. Volume 21 contains almost all of Lonergan’s typewritten work on economics prior to and including the 1944 Essay in Circulation Analysis. Lonergan’s theory, however, remains largely unknown to both orthodox and heterodox economics. Within the contemporary ethos, economic models typically are remote from actual economic activities in cities, towns and people’s lives. Lonergan’s theory, by contrast, begins with economic activities. It builds on a key observation that there are not just “firms and households” but two functionally distinct types of firm. Businesses can and often do function in both ways, depending on transactions. Orthodox economics has been causing great damage to world cultures and ecosystems. Attempts to merely adjust mainstream models have proven ineffective. Within heterodox economics there has been a growing interest in finding a viable alternative. This paper gives a brief introduction to the alternative provided by Bernard Lonergan’s two-flow theory. It is a theory that will ground the possibility of effective and humane strategies for local and global economies. Elements of this paper were originally presented at the International Confederation of Associations for Pluralism in Economics (ICAPE), January 4th, 2018, Drexel University in Philadelphia.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".