Desde que conozco a Kantor siempre he tendido a pensar que tiene una versión una visión moderadamente trasnochada de las cosas y especialmente de la economía (ah! los conflictos intergeneracionales):PPPPPPP. Pero lo cierto es que leyendo este párrafo me he convencido de ello:

Though the economics of the classical era was not united by a distinctive doctrine or method, it nevertheless had a common leitmotiv. This was the conception of a circular flow o income, of the economy as an interdependent system.(…)

In the microeconomic analysis of individual prices and markets, classical economists hardly went beyond the scholastics and mercantilists. They went far beyond them, however, in their macroeconomic analysis of the economy as a whole. Around 1680, Petty began to look at the economy with the eyes of a national income statistician and Boisguilbert expressed crude but sound notions about competitive resource allocation. This set the stage for the first input-output account, constructed half a entury later by Cantillon and Quesnay. Under the impact of monetary disorders, mercantilist notions about the stimulating effects of money developed into an explicit monetary macrodynamics with the quantity theory of money as its static counterpart. For Hume gold was distributed by a self-regulating feedback control mechanism. Smith extended this idea to the economic system as a whole, governed by the invisible hand of competition. Malthus applied fedback control to population and Ricardo to capital accumulation. Ricardo’s fundamental concern became the eventual self-braking of the growth process by the shifts in distribution caused by diminishing returns. In the classical era economics became a (crude) form of macroeconomic system analysis.

With the rise of marginalism, the macroeconomic insights of the classical era did not disappear. They were revealed not as false but as incomplete. What was missing was an explicit analysis of the microeconomic calculus by which households and firms optimize their decisions. This analysis was the collective achievement of the marginalist era. To the extent that the microeconomic problems were solved, the results were gradually incorporated into the circular flow system inherited from the classical era. There emerged the general equilibrium synthesis of the Walrasian era.

Jurg Niehans, A history of economic theory, pg 12

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