Epistemology of Economics

I don’t think I am reaching by saying that heterodox approaches to economics are epistemologically different from mainstream approaches. For example, many ecological economists simply disavow things that environmental economists. take as given, such as GDP. We can probably find similar discrepancies in terms of what different sub-disciplines view as valid or invalid types of [...]

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Tom Palley to Her Highness: “The failure was due to the sociology of the economics profession.”

Via Econospeak (which is quickly becoming one of my favorite blogs), Thomas Palley has written a response to the Queen of England’s request for an explanation on why no one predicted the crisis. He was actually responding to a different response letter written by Tim Besley and Peter Hennessy, in which they argued that the [...]

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A Heterodox Ranking of Econ PhD Programs

It’s been too long since I’ve been meaning to post this…
A devoted reader of this blog emailed me two articles recently; the first (pdf), by Therese Grijalva and Clifford Nowell, was published last year in the Southern Economic Journal. It endeavors to rank PhD programs in economics overall and by field. They essentially assign a [...]

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“A triumph of good judgment”

Robert Skidlesky has an opinion piece in the Financial Times (h/t Mark Thoma) in which he injects the insight of Keynes and the notion of intellectual battles into current debates. Skidelsky is an important scholar of Keynes, and wrote an award-winning three-volume biography about his life and work.
Skidlesky begins by distinguishing economics from the natural [...]

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Death by 1,000 Citations

I was on Mankiw’s blog today. He had a brag about the Quarterly Journal of Economics (published at Harvard, where he works) earning the number one ranking in a new journal ranking paper.
Harvard’s QJE is number one, natch.
For the unacquainted, “natch” is slang for naturally. Ugh. Anyways, that’s not the point of this post.
The article [...]

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“Pragmatic Inquiry” and Economics

At Understanding Society, Daniel Little has an excellent post about the different views towards pragmatism in intellectual circles.
Intellectuals are sometimes accused of being out of touch with the real world. But there is a strong thread of intellectual life that proceeds on the basis of a commitment to linking thought to action, theory to practical [...]

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Not Just a Failure of Economists

I agree with everything Peter Dorman has to say in this post at EconoSpeak. A couple key points:

First, economic theory, taken as a whole, is culpable. The core problem is that each theoretical departure, whether it is a knotty agency problem or a behavioral kink, is inserted into an otherwise pristine general equilibrium framework. The [...]

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Manhattan Project for Economics?

Via Mark Thoma, I learn that the “Perimeter Institute conference on economics is being organized in an effort to better evaluate the state of economics as a predictive and descriptive science in light of the current market crisis.”
A couple abstracts stick out in particular:

A Science Less Dismal: Welcome to the Economic Manhattan Project [...]

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The Solution: Empirical Economics?

Everyone seems to be talking about this article by Barry Eichengreen, whose main point (an optimistic one) is that,
In contrast, the twenty-first century will be the age of inductive economics, when empiricists hold sway and advice is grounded in concrete observation of markets and their inhabitants. Work in economics, including the abstract model building in [...]

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A Polanyi Moment

John Kay, a Scottish economist who I had not heard of until tonight, has a great article in the Financial Times today (h/t Mark Thoma). In it, he criticizes economists who blindly seek a “theory of everything.” And, no, Kay is not a Johnny-come-lately. Back in 2003, he wrote another article with the following lede:
The [...]

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