Interesting Economic Discussions

I assumed that economists are like engineers who fix problems as they come up and sometimes even struggle to figure out the problems. This approach is exemplified by Partha Dasgupta's
comments:
“Despite the interdisciplinary nature of my enquiries, the lens through which I
have studied the social world has been that of economics. I have assumed a point of view of the
circumstances of living that gives prominence to the allocation of scarce resources - among
contemporaries and across the generations. One hallmark of the viewpoint is to study human well-being in terms of its commodity determinants and the institutions that shape our lives. Another is to reason quantitatively. Moreover, because it is subject to empirical discipline, the inquiry encourages approximations. Inevitably, the viewpoint is partial. But increasingly I have come to realize that it is possible to look outward from that partial view to catch a glimpse of the larger enterprise called "living". I do that regularly in the essays that follow and, in the one methodological essay in the present collection, I respond to several prominent critics of contemporary economics by showing that they misunderstand the foundations of my discipline.
While re-reading the essays here, I noticed that I have rarely ever published an article in which
the bird I was ultimately able to catch was in fact caught. This is because I have rarely ever known what it was that I was really after. Maybe I knew it subconsciously, but I doubt that. In my case, a discovery has meant a growing realization, not a blinding revelation. Usually, it has taken me several publications,brick by metaphorical brick, before I was able even to understand what the phenomenon I had been working on was, let alone to uncover the pathways that give rise to the phenomenon. I don't know whether this is a common experience among scientists, but I doubt it. I suspect there is nothing common among the processes by which we gain an understanding of the world around us."

But it seems lot of economic thinking is also driven by ideology and politics. Before I loose track of them ( once discussions get in to archives, it seems difficult to locate them), I record URL's of some recent discussions, particularly from Mark Thoma's site .
A general discussion of politics in economics:
matthewyglesias.
See also the discussion
where suddenly this kind of statements jump out:
"Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution. "
Discussion of Christopher Hayes article on neoclassical indoctrination:
Mark Thoma
crooked Timber.
Some Comments in Crooked Timber:
1)…
Too much of economics teaching is reminiscent of calculus as practiced by Wernher von Braun (in the words of Tom Lehrer): “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department,” says Wernher von Braun.
Posted by Ken Houghton · November 15th, 2006 at 3:30 pm
2) Say, rather, that neoclassical economics is a very useful set of disciplinary tools for somebody whose instincts and intuitions are on the left. They sharpen your arguments and clarify your thought. By contrast, I think that most people whose instincts and intuitions are on the right find their arguments dulled and muddied by too much exposure to neoclassical economics…

Extensive discussion of invisible hand:
Mark Thoma
Towards the end of the comments, there is a lot of quibbling about definitions.

Pardha Dasgupta's defence of traditional economics:
here and Pardha Dasgupta gives a lesson in math. economics here.
Partha Dasgupta's comments on Stern Report discussed in
Brad DeLong.
There are too many referencesto Mark Thoma and Pardha Dasgupta. It is just that I feel at the moment that Mark Thoma is really struggling to explore the relevance of economics. About Pardha Dasgupta, I heard in the early 80's that he used to travel around India on his bike trying to study the economic and social conditions. I will spend the next few months trying to understand some of these discussions.