Responses to Our Commentators

We thank our commentators for fair, helpful queries that allow us to extend some aspects of our work. We take very seriously James Buchanan’s admonition to try to see the world through other windows than the one to which we are accustomed. In this, as in so many other matters, Buchanan echoes the point of view articulated by John Stuart Mill.

David Colander offers the challenging view that the members of the Virginia School did not work diligently enough to ensure that their dissent from the orthodox was seen as methodological not ideology. As a group outside the orthodoxy of economics, the Virginia economists needed to take repeated and significant steps to appear ideologically unbiased. This, he states, they failed to do.