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This post is on economic methodology – so may seem a bit wonkish to some. However, if you aim to tell economists why they are dumb asses and that physical scientists should do it – it is probably worth having a look at this. While trawling the internet (in an environmentally sustainable way) I ran […]
Excellent quote (ht Economist’s View): Popper’s critique of historicism, then, can be rephrased as a compelling critique of the model of the natural sciences as a meta-theory for the social and historical sciences. History and society are not law-governed systems for which we might eventually hope to find exact and comprehensive theories. Instead, they are […]
I just asked this new Wolfram Alpha search engine “what is economics”. It told me: Economics: The branch of social science that deals with the production and distribution and consumption of goods and services and their management This differs from the Robbins definition of economic science: Economics is a science which studies human behavior as […]
In this post I will try to say what economics is – at least, as far as I understand it 😛 . The purpose of this piece is to be part of the set of posts for new readers – so feedback is very appreciated.
Arnold Kling is right that Macroeconomics is only a subset of economics – and as a result a failure in macroeconomics does not damn the whole economic method. However, I think he might be giving macroeconomists a bit of a free ride here. Think of it this way – microeconomics has evolved to generalise hypotheses […]
Update: Clive Crook has a better discussion of what is going on than I do (original here) – and how irritating it is – than I do. I’m embarrassed to say that I’m a few days behind on my blog reading, so I only saw this after writing my post 🙁 Even if nothing else […]