I WROTE this boekje at Erasmus University during a year's visit in 1996. For the opportunities to discuss the ideas I thank the groups at Erasmus in econometrics and business economics, and the Studium General. Others who during the year heard my worries about economics and tried to set me on the right path include Wilfred Dolfsma, Jean Gaakeer, Arjo Klamer, Uskali Mäki, Irene van Staveren, the seminar in Argument Theory at the University of Amsterdam, the Phoenix Society of the Technical University of Delft, the Institute for Economic Affairs ( London), the annual conference of the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy at Antwerp, and university seminars in economics at East Anglia, York ( Canada), Macquarie, Groningen, Dundee, University College Dublin, the London School of Economics, Katholieke Universiteit Brabant, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Gothenburg, and Copenhagen.
I wish to thank Piet Akkermans, the Rector Magnificus of Erasmus, for showing in numerous ways the liberal and humanist values I praise here. I thank the Departments of Economics, Philosophy, and Art and Cultural Studies for their hospitality towards someone out of the mainstream of their normal science. I expected the Dutch to be by comparison with Americans a little more formal and a little less warm, but I was wrong. I thank my academic colleagues--teachers, students, and staff--and the many friends I have already made outside the academy in Rotterdam for their extraordinary welcome to their country, inviting me into
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