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tell. If you look at a typical textbook on location, like Dicken and Lloyd's Location in Space, or a
survey like Michael Chisholm's Regions in Recession and Resurgence both excellent books, by the way,
which I have found very helpful you will find each of these ways of looking at agglomeration treated
under a separate heading, as in effect a disjoint set of ideas. Central-place theory is viewed as a static
neoclassical construct, when it is surely inconsistent with the neoclassical assumption of perfect
competition and hard to imagine occurring except via a dynamic process. Market potential appears in a
section or chapter on demand; cumulative causation in a section or chapter on dynamics, often treated
as something having to do with Keynesian economics and export multipliers. And external economies
are stuck in yet another place, often in the discussion of Weber and the three-points problem. So the
impression of a unified, sensible tradition in economic geography that I may have conveyed is partly a
construct, perhaps even to a greater extent than my rosy backward look at high development theory:
now that we have a model, we impose a coherence on ideas that may have been far less coherent at the
time.
So the sad exile of economic geography also has no villains. One cannot fault the geographers for their
failure to develop full maximization-and-equilibrium models although one can perhaps complain about
their failure to understand how far short of that ideal they were falling. And one can understand the
reluctance of the mainstream economists to muddy the clarity of that mainstream with the somewhat
murky modeling efforts of the geographers although the unwillingness to grant even one page in a
thousand to fairly sensible efforts to make sense of an important subject seems extreme. And as with
development
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