On the Impossibility of Reducing the Surplus Approach to a Neo-Classical Special Case. A criticism of Hahn in a ”Solowian” context

We propose a new criticism of Frank Hahn’s attempt to prove that the surplus approach constitutes no more than a ‘special case’ of the neoclassical model of intertemporal general equilibrium. In particular, we show that Hahn’s ‘special case’ is vitiated by the paradox of determining the past as a function of the future. In order to make the communication between schools of thought easier, we present our criticism of Hahn within a mathematical framework drawn from the well-known Solow growth model.