Tag Archives: economic methodology

Reinhart and Rogoff. Why didn't they take responsibility, a student asked Andrew Gelman. Statistics professor Gelman answers:  It wasn't actually about the data in the minds of R & R, so being wrong about it apparently made no significant difference to them. Empirical result? Meh.Rationalists, or just ideologues with a cognitive bias? Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social ScienceThe ladder of social science reasoning, 4 statements in increasing order of generality, or Why...

Another one on methodology.I, my view, Tim Harford is basically correct in thinking that the optimal methodological approach in economics, as in the social sciences, is to "let a hundred flowers bloom," to borrow a metaphor from Chairman Mao. But from the POV of the "hard" sciences, "soft science" is not "real" science. That is drawing lines arbitrarily. It basically says that the other "sciences" are not physics or chemistry. Well, doh. Anyway, the post is worth a read. It takes off from a...

More on pluralism in economics. Traditionalism has something to say to liberalism about both substance and process. What is Islamic Economics? A paper by Hafas Furqani “Defining Islamic Economics: Scholars’ Approach, Clarifying The Nature, Scope and Subject-Matter of The Discipline” lists more than 21 definitions, citing in addition several authors who state that there is no need for such a definition. Why is there such a variety of definitions, and what can be done to arrive at consensus...

Noah Smith assumes that the methodological question has been decided in favor of formalism.Lars P. Syll’s BlogNoah Smith’s new MMT critique — more nonsense on stiltsLars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

Radical uncertainty is feature of a complex adaptive system a chief characteristic of which is emergence. Emergence is at the heart of evolution theory. Emergence in this context means that there is no way to predict what will emerge from a complex adaptive system based on investigation of the past and present state of the system. This implies that surprise is a characteristic of such systems. This also implies that complex adaptive systems are like open systems rather than closed,...

While the mainstream is defined by an insistence on method, the heterodoxy is defined by a concern with reality. What is so powerful about the conception, and what seems to have been almost entirely ignored, is what comes next. The implication of Lawson’s conception is that heterodox economics encompasses all those researchers that desire to study economic phenomena in accordance with our best understanding of how social phenomena exist. What method they decide to use is not a factor in...

In September 1970 Milton Friedman published an articlein The New York Times Magazine, “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits.” Friedman, who has received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1976, is probably the most influential economist of the second half of the twentieth century. His views have become the mainstream economic thinking, although few economists today care to state them as boldly as Friedman. In my recent book UltrasocietyI use the examples of...

Just about any one of them is fatal.Fresh Economic Thinking Decent criticisms of economics? Here are 111 of them. Cameron K. Murray

More thoughts on economic methodology. First a framework is needed and then theories can be constructed and tested in that framework. The simplest frame and most economical theory that explains the data sufficiently to be useful is preferred.A framework involving complexity is not necessarily better than one that doesn't as long as it gets the job done.Smith observes that theories constructed within the conventional framework that conventional economists presume is not getting the job of...

As an historian, I am somewhat appalled at the inability of economists, including those on this blog to get the history of their own discipline straight.  The obsession has been with neoclassical economic’s attempt to turn economics into a physico-mathematical discipline as Walras phrased it, and the economists usually discuss this attempt within the historical context of their discipline pre-1945, with references, to  Walras, Marshall, Keynes, and others. It  became clear to me over...