Tag Archives: philosophy of economics

Finance and philosophy.Money, Maths and MagicThe Golden RuleTim Johnson | Lecturer (associate professor) in the Department of Actuarial Mathematics and Statistics, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh

The other day, Rethinking Economics and the New Weather Institute published "33 theses" and metaphorically nailed them to the doors of the London School of Economics. They're re-published here. I think the "Protestant Reformation" metaphor they're going for is definitely appropriate: they're aiming to replace "neoclassical economics" — the Roman Catholic dogma in this metaphor — with a a pluralistic set of different dogmas — the various dogmas of the Protestant denominations (Lutheran,...

Math is purely formal, involving the relation of signs based on formation and transformation rules. Signs are given significance based on definitions. Math is applicable to the world through science to the degree that the definitions are amenable to measurement and the model assumptions approximate real world conditions (objects in relation to others) and events (patterned changes in these relations). Methodological choices determine the scope and scale of the model, which in turn...

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...

On reductionism.This is also the case in philosophy where different methods attempt to exclude other methods by reducing the debate to a lower level of data, e.g, sense data only, or lower order of abstraction, e.g., all abstraction must be reducible to first order. These methodological assumptions reduce justification to observations of objects. For example, David Hume used philosophical reduction to sense data to exclude causality, arguing that causality is nothin more than observation of...

I agree that "unrealistic assumptions" has to be just about the laziest econ critique in existence. I wrote a post I was particularly proud of about how a lot of econ criticism is starting to look like vacuous art criticism. Information Transfer EconomicsLazy econ critique critiquesJason Smith