Now in real markets there is no auctioneer; buying and selling is continuous, prices actually emerge from the dynamic interaction of different agents who don't have perfect knowledge and often use rules of thumb or customs to guide their decisions.
Even within the neoclassical tradition there have been many economists who have introduced space and time into their work. Starting with Harold Hotelling's analysis of where how ice-cream sellers would "space" themselves along a beach, there have developed whole sub-branches of economics: spatial economics, economic geography and regional economics. Similarly with time; economists knew economic processes took time so they introduced various types of "lags" into their models - although these did tend to disappear once "rational expectations" were introduced and things happened instantaneously. Yet unfortunately it is true to say that such approaches have remained peripheral to the big issues of macroeconomics; being confined on the whole to micro, though important, issues like transport and schooling.
Please keep it real
The absence of space and time is not the only unrealistic feature of neoclassical economics. It also tend to ignore most important aspects of scale, energy use, resource limits, how aggregate markets are not scaled up individual demand and supply curves, and how economic actors actually interact, adapt, behave and choose. There is also no concept of time's arrow, i.e. the irreversibility of processes and how such "path dependence" is crucial for economic development.The point is that even though all these factors have been studied by some excellent economists (usually of the non neoclassical variety), they are still marginalised within academia, business and government policy making. Stripped down classical mechanics still rules the roost.
In 1954 Milton Friedman argued that it doesn't matter if the assumptions made by economics are unrealistic as long as the models make accurate predictions. The sad fact is, however, that these models have not only proved spectacularly unable to make predictions, and not just of periodic financial and banking crises, but much more importantly they haven't even been able to explain such events after the fact. When something happens that shouldn't have been able to occur according to their models, neoclassical economists rush around trying to retrofit their theories – mostly without success.
Taking a fresh view
As economies and other social systems evolve through time and space major inequalities emerge, in income, wealth, population densities and so on - all manifestations of Zipf's Law. Approaches to economics that start with people, firms and institutions interacting with and adapting to each other in space and time can generally "explain" this phenomenon; inequality is endogenous or, better said, an emergent property of all complex adaptive systems.On the other hand, neoclassical economics struggles with inequalities – they are rather mysterious. Free trade, arbitrage, the invisible hand of the price system plus economic growth "trickling down" to the poor should tend to eliminate them. Obviously they never have, so the answer must lie in making the world better fit the stylised economic models rather than changing the models to better explain the world; a completely unscientific approach that has appalled natural scientists. So, for instance, the IMF and the International Trade Organisation impose "structural adjustment" and free trade with never ending alacrity. The contention is that they will bring about economic growth and ultimately lead to a reduction in poverty and inequality. Of course it never happens and millions suffer the miserable consequences.
Turning to the environment, in scientific terms neoclassical economics is a "closed system", consumers consume, firms produce and money circulates to oil the wheels. It's a circular flow. Implicitly a boundary circle has been drawn around the system. Things outside this circle, such as finite energy or resources, the environment or even other species, either don't exist or are treated as "externalities" and very often not even "priced". Energy and resources can be had in limitless quantities forever, though the input price may vary. This completely misunderstands the two laws of thermodynamics - the conservation of energy and the entropy law – both of which operate in space and time. All economic wealth is created by energy and resources. These often take eons to accumulate in specific locations and are not limitless, yet they can be used up very quickly indeed in a mass entropic civilisation such as ours. The consequences are there for all but the blinkered to see.
It's very unlikely that neoclassical economics will ever be able to make a real contribution to alleviating poverty, tackling ecological despoliation and moving us towards a more just and sustainable world. But there are many other sorts of economics in which human and planetary justice matter. It is to these that we must look.
