ABSTRACT
Just as conventional economics follows standard science, so do conventional histories of economic thought tell the story of how economists have formalized Adam Smith’s informal understanding of how competition guides people to serve the common good. Most conventional histories agree that economics is not as far along as is physics, but they see the search for a more formal simple structural model as the right one and present the history of economics accordingly. Thus, they see the formalization of supply and demand, production functions, general equilibrium theory, national income accounting, and the concepts of capital and labor as structural simplifications that have marked progress in economics.
