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Document Page 54 a model that at best treats half the question have received so much more attention than other approaches that made a pretty good stab at answering the other half? The answer, of course, is that while the approaches I have described up to this point may have been insightful, they offered no opportunity for economists to make use of the tools they had. By contrast, the von Thünen model might almost have been designed as a showpiece for the power of the competitive, constant-returns paradigm. Two parallels should immediately be obvious. First, von Thünen was to economic geography what the Lewis surplus-labor model was to development. That is, it was the one piece of a heterodox framework that could easily be handled with orthodox methods, and so it attracted research effort out of all proportion to its considerable merits. (This parallel presumes that the other approaches I have described add up to a common framework, which may be not at all obvious at this point; but I'll argue in a little while that they do.) Second, the focus on the von Thünen approach is reminiscent of the attitudes of geologists in the era before the discovery of seafloor spreading. They understood erosion, which tears mountains down, while lacking a model for understanding how they get built up and thus the core of geological theory was the loving analysis of erosion by water, wind, and ice. Economists understood why economic activity spreads out, not why it becomes concentrated and thus the central model of spatial economics became one that deals only with the way that competition for land drives economic activities away from a central market. There is, however, only so much that you can say about concentric rings of land use. As much as the von Thünen model may have met with the approval of mainstream file:///D|/Export2/www.netlibrary.com/nlreader/nlreader.dll@bookid=409&filename=page_54.html [4/18/2007 10:30:20 AM]
Document economists, it was not enough to sustain a vital field. And so spatial economics languished along the periphery of economics proper. Page 55 What economic geography needed and still needs in order to be revitalized is a synthesis that brings back the other half of the story. It needs something that will legitimize and make sense of the insights of the outcast approaches. I believe that we now have the intellectual tools to create that synthesis. But I am not the first one to think so. So let me digress for a bit to talk about two valiant but failed efforts to bring space into the economic mainstream. Spatial Economics: Two Failed Efforts I guess it's obvious, both from what I've said so far in these lectures and from other things I've written, that I believe that economic geography's time has come, that we are ready to put spatial concerns into the mainstream of economics. But history scoffs at my optimism. At least twice in the period since World War II it seemed that spatial economics was about to break into the big time. Yet in both cases the wave broke well short of the beach. The first big effort to get space into economics came in the 1950s, under the leadership of the redoubtable Walter Isard. Isard was and is a man of huge energy and vast learning; he performed an invaluable service in making the previously inaccessible German tradition available to monolingual economists like myself; and he created an interdisciplinary enterprise, regional science, which has been of considerable practical importance in the real world. But the aim he set himself in his magnum opus, Location and Space-Economy, to bring spatial concerns into the heart of economic theory, was never attained. file:///D|/Export2/www.netlibrary.com/nlreader/nlreader.dll@bookid=409&filename=page_55.html [4/18/2007 10:30:21 AM]
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