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economies because they knew they had no way to model that aspect.
Page 37
This may seem like a strong statement to make in isolation. So let me now turn to a brief survey of what
seem to me, with the benefit of hindsight, to have been the most important traditions in spatial
economics before, say, 1980. I hope that by the end of this discussion I will have persuaded you that my
diagnosis is basically right.
Five Traditions in Economic Geography
These lectures are a meditation on economic theory, not a scholarly history of thought. As a
consequence, I take the liberty of being both casual and dictatorial about my attributions. I will not
worry too much about who exactly had priority in some idea; thus while Mark Blaug, in his Economic
Theory in Retrospect, tells us that Launhardt not only was the real author of much that we attribute to
von Thünen but also anticipated much of Weber, I will refer to Weber and von Thünen, since those are
the ''brand names" under which certain ideas have come to be known. I will also give short shrift to a
vast literature, partly because I am not anywhere near as well read in it as I would like to be, partly
because I want to make a point rather than survey a field.
In other words, I want to do for spatial economics the same thing I did for development economics in
the last lecture: use a biased set of references to argue that there was a set of core ideas that make
considerable sense in light of recent economic analysis, but that were unacceptable to mainstream
economics because they could not at that time be modeled.
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