In the architecture of mainstream economics, there is a myth that holds the entire edifice in place — a quiet but persuasive belief known as the cumulative view. It is not taught explicitly in textbooks, but it hums beneath every model, every theorem, every footnote citing “further developments.” It suggests, with a kind of calm authority, that economics is steadily climbing a staircase toward truth. Each new theory is a step above the last, each error corrected, each fallacy expunged.
But what if this staircase is an illusion?
What if, as Alessandro Roncaglia quietly insists in The Wealth of Ideas, our journey is not upward but circular — or more dangerously, unexamined?
The Promise of Ascent
To understand the cumulative view is to step inside the positivist dream: the notion that knowledge — especially scientific knowledge — advances linearly. Like a library where each new book refines the previous one, or a road where every turn brings us closer to a final destination.
Applied to economics, this view holds that today’s models are better than yesterday’s because they are more rigorous, more tested, more aligned with data. Ricardo is valuable only insofar as his ideas anticipate today’s; Marx is meaningful only if you can trace his influence on modern heterodox curves. All else is just a historical curiosity — to be admired perhaps, but not studied seriously.
It is an efficient narrative. Comforting. Clean.
But it is also wrong.
The Skeleton Behind the Smile
What Roncaglia reveals — like turning a portrait to see the scaffolding behind the canvas — is that this narrative masks as much as it illuminates. The cumulative view depends on a narrow conception of science, one inherited from a simplified version of logical positivism. In this worldview, theories are validated either by logical consistency (tautologies) or by empirical verification (observations). All other statements — about ethics, justice, power, history — are dismissed as “metaphysical.” Not wrong, just irrelevant.
And yet, as every serious student of society knows, our economic theories are filled with such statements. They appear in the assumptions we make about human behavior, about markets, about what counts as “rational.” They hide in the language of “agents” and “efficiency,” and in the quiet erasure of institutions, conflict, or inequality. The cumulative view pretends these ideas are neutral. But they are not.
They are choices.
The Blind Spot of Progress
The danger, then, is not that the cumulative view is naïve. It is that it blinds us to the conceptual foundations of our thinking. In the name of “objectivity,” it discourages questioning the models we use. In the name of “progress,” it silences alternatives.
And worse — it fosters forgetfulness.
If economics has indeed progressed, it has also lost many things. The moral clarity of the classical economists. The institutional realism of the German historical school. The messy, lived complexity of Keynes’s uncertainty or Veblen’s social texture. The cumulative view dismisses these losses as necessary casualties of sophistication. But perhaps they were simply neglected paths — not wrong, just inconvenient.
Roncaglia reminds us that to believe in cumulative ascent is to believe that the present holds all that is valuable. But this is a form of intellectual hubris. “Today’s frontier” may be sharp, but it may also be narrow. It may not be where we should be looking.
The Quiet Revolutions
There are other stories.
Thomas Kuhn spoke of paradigms — self-contained worldviews that guide what scientists see, ask, and ignore. Progress, in his eyes, does not come from accumulation but from rupture. From crises. From abandoning the old staircase entirely and building another.
Imre Lakatos, more cautiously, proposed “scientific research programs,” coexisting and competing. There is no guarantee of convergence, only the hope that one program is more fruitful than another, more open to refinement, more generative.
These stories are not as tidy as the cumulative view. But they may be more honest. More human.
They recognize that theories are born from visions. That ideas rise and fall not only on evidence but on values, aesthetics, and even politics. That what we consider “progress” depends on where we choose to look.
Rethinking the Climb
So where does this leave us?
Not in despair, but in sobriety.
The cumulative view is not evil. It was born of a noble impulse: to clarify, to refine, to get closer to truth. But when it becomes dogma, it begins to narrow our field of vision. It replaces curiosity with consensus, and inquiry with inheritance.
Roncaglia does not urge us to discard theory or rigor. He asks something simpler, and more radical: that we remember. That we see economics not as a staircase but as a forest — tangled, diverse, full of trails both worn and wild. That we study the past not as a prelude to now, but as a source of genuine insight.
Some paths were abandoned too soon. Others were never finished. Still others, dismissed as dead ends, may lead to clearing when the light shifts.
The Patience of Knowing
In the end, to reject the cumulative view is not to reject science. It is to embrace it more fully — with humility, with openness, with the awareness that our models are tools, not truths. That every economic statement is shaped by the hands that wrote it, and the world they lived in.
The staircase is a comforting fiction. But the real work happens on the ground — in the dialogue between past and present, theory and history, vision and critique.
And in that dialogue, the economist is not a climber but a listener. A translator. A caretaker of ideas.
Not merely of what we know — but of how we have come to know.