In our PhD Economics program at Stanford, we learnt nothing about the history of major economic events of the twentieth century. Instead, we were taught the rather arcane and difficult skill of building models. In order to analyse what would happen in an economy, we learnt that you have to construct an artificial economy, populated by rational robots called homo economicus, who behave according to strict mathematical laws. At no point in our studies were we asked to match what happens in our models with any events in the real world; it was assumed that the two always matched. This process of economic modelling permits us to provide exact mathematical answers to a vast range of questions one might ask about the economy. This is undoubtedly a powerful technique, which has earned economics the name “Queen of the Social Sciences”. Our poor cousins in political science, psychology, sociology, geography, and so on, have to study the more complex real world, and cannot offer anything comparable. Nonetheless, the power of mathematical modelling derives from the extremely unrealistic assumption that real world events and human behaviour can be predicted by mathematical formulae. Thus, the precise predictions of economists are often dramatically contradicted by real world outcomes. As Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman remarked after the global financial crisis took economists by surprise: “the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.” read more
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The Education of an Economist
from Asad Zaman
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—— Ugarteche, Puyana and Madi ——
Gerson Lima / Maria Alejandra Madi
Edward Fullbrook and Jamie Morgan
————— Michael Hudson ————–
Maria Alejandra Madi / Jack Reardon
————- Edward Fullbrook ————-
—————— Steve Keen —————–
————— Richard Smith —————
————– Gustavo Marques————
– Victor Beker and Beniamino Moro –
————– Lars Pålsson Syll ————-
—————– Stuart Birks —————-
Edward Fullbrook and Jamie Morgan
———— Armando Ochangco ———-
Shimshon Bichler / Jonathan Nitzan
————— Mauro Gallegati ————–
————— Herman Daly —————-
————— Asad Zaman —————
—————– C. T. Kurien —————
————— Robert Locke —————-
Real-World Economics Review Blog 
What passes for “strict mathematical laws” is often what Paul Romer called “Mathiness” (https://paulromer.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Mathiness.pdf). Topic 1 in Econ 101 is inevitably about the P=MC “equilibrium” produced by perfect competition; but it only takes elementary calculus to show that it isn’t an equilibrium: http://www.johnmlegge.com/blog/maths-of-competitive-equilibrium/
Mathematics gets used like a bullfighter’s cape or a conjurors gestures: to distract and confuse rather than to convey information.
“The task of creating a new economics remains as essential as it is undone.”
I took my Phd in Modern European History at UCLA in 1965. My PhD dissertation was about French Royalists at the beginning of the 3rd Republic (Princeton UP, 1974), so when I got around to looking at the industrialization of the19th-20th centuriess, comparing national performances in France, Germany, and the UK, I noticed that economists had ceased to pay any attention in their programs to the subject in a historical context. So I could learn nothing from them of use in my own historical research. On the contrary, I learned that economic historians that I admired and who had been comparing French, German, and British industrialization (e.g., David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus), were being attacked methodologically by historians trained in neoclassical economics, for methodological shortcomings, i.e., lack of knowledge of neoclassical economics and econometrics. It was a hard slog to oppose the self-confident New Economic Historians, armed with neoclassical assumptions, but it did not take long to discover that the real historical word did not correlate to neoclassical economics. Even McCloskey, who was leader of the NEH crowd, did a volteface on the subject, which made it easier to be a dissident from the new paradigm of economic historians influenced by triumphant neoclassical economics. I never was taken in by neoclassical methodologies, because as a person who did research in the real world, I knew economics was on a wrong path. But so what?, they ran the world, and ignored historical based research, and still do.
Some of the results from Colander’s and Klamer’s 1987 report and its latest update are relevant here.
On the question, “Neoclassical economics is relevant for the economic problems of today”
In 1987 34% strongly agreed. By 2007 that percentage was 54%. For somewhat agree the percentages are 54 and 39; Disagree 11 and 7. No opinion 1 and 0.
On the question, “Economists agree on fundamental issues” the percentages for these same answers are:
4% and 17% for strongly agree. Agree 40 and 61. Disagree 52 and 20. No opinion 4 and 2.
You can see why Colander concluded that “the current state of the profession is healthy,” for both 1987 and 2007.
“Is Neoclassical economics relevant for the economic problems of today”? Of course it is. It is the cause of most of them, or in any case the main reason they are not being resolved.
Nothing in the responses of the graduate students Colander interviewed all the way through the finish of graduate school indicates most of them support your hypothesis.
The problem is that in the education of economists, the neoclassical format took over everywhere after WWII. In 1900 and 1940 study programs for economsts would have been different. It all depends on what the professors are teaching their students. I would like to know what historians, who were very much falling under the influence of neoclassical economics in their own studies in the 1960s and 1970s, feel about the importance of neoclassical economics to the study of the past now. I was always skeptical and I think the number of skeptics among historians originally taken in by the scientific paradigm of neoclassical economics has grown enormously. Economists claimed that their field was the physics of social science, but if more noneconomists in the social sciences and humanities no longer are impressed by the economists’ pretention, then, the economists’ ball game should be over.
Here is what Wikepedia says about what has happened to the NEH.
“The new economic history, also known as cliometrics, refers to the systematic use of economic theory and/or econometric techniques to the study of economic history. The term cliometrics was originally coined by Jonathan R. T. Hughes and Stanley Reiter in 1960 and refers to Clio, who was the muse of history and heroic poetry in Greek mythology. Cliometricians argue their approach is necessary because the application of theory is crucial in writing solid economic history, while historians generally oppose this view warning against the risk of generating anachronisms. Early cliometrics was a type of counterfactual history. However, counterfactualism is no longer its distinctive feature. Some have argued that cliometrics had its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s and that it is now neglected by economists and historians.[4]
In recent decades economic historians, following Douglass North, have tended to move away from narrowly quantitative studies toward institutional, social, and cultural history affecting the evolution of economies.[5][a 1]”
In response to Ken, my point was, that nothing in Collander’s question suggested the possibility of malign relevance, and its says something about the education of economists that none of his respondents realised this for themselves.
Enlarging on that for Bob, it is hard to see even historians of the calibre of Mirowski and yourself ever becoming effective critics of physically-oriented economists and social scientists until they realise that economics and other forms of human interaction and control are all about communication, not physical force. They need to open their eyes to the existence and significance of the post-war development of information science in light of war-time struggles with misleading propaganda, encryption, uncertainty, environmental corruption of messages, deliberately misleading changes of meaning etc. Michael Hudson’s book (listed right) is to the point: “Finance as War”.
“it is hard to see even historians of the calibre of Mirowski and yourself ever becoming effective critics of physically-oriented economists and social scientists until they realise that economics and other forms of human interaction and control are all about communication”
Dave, it is hard for me to get people like you to understand that historians are not concerned with the substance of the scientific discussion going on in this blog. As I say in my article “History as a Source of Economic Policy” in the most recent issue of the rwer, historians leave that up to people who are more qualified scientifically and mathematically. What I as an historian do is talk about people who call themselves economists and what they say about their endeavor. I got involved in that discussion in the 1980s when I picked up Stafford Beers book on Operational Research from a rubbish bin in the library of the British Academy of Management. The book was being discarded. From there I went to the Journal of Operational Research Society starting issue one, page one, and read issue by issue up to 1980. I knew nothing about OR so I let people in OR tell me about what they thought about their subject. They at first were full of confidence, but by 1980s this confidence turned to doubt. I reported about this in my book, Management and Higher Education Since 1940, Chapters 1 & 2, The New Paradigm and the New Paradigm Revisited, not by discussing operational research but by discussing what people engaged in OR thought about the validity of their enterprise after doing it thirty years. Is this sort of information of interest to scientists. Probably not, scientists like yourself do not pay any attention to it. You want to assert the validity of the science you think is valid. I cannot discuss that, but I do know about hubris, neoclassical economists had it in spades after WWII, and suffer now because of it. Most scientists are wrong and that includes you Dave, but I won’t argue it. I’ll let others do it. I’ll just report what they say in the great human debate. about knowledge. Besides, I know as a Christian you are well aware of hubris.
As an historian I agree with much of what Bob writes. But I have what I think is one advantage over Bob. I’ve seen these discussions (some quite vicious) from several chairs. As well as history I also have degrees in math, literature (American focus). Engineering (electrical), anthropology, and psychology. I even went through a few graduate economics classes. For years the History of Science focused little on the “behavioral and social” sciences and what these historians did write was largely celebratory of the physical scientists – attempting to explain how they accomplished such miraculous results. Much the same is the case for how sociology and psychology studied science (although this was not until the 1970s a subfield within sociology and economic sociology did not come along till the 1990s). Anthropology like history was mired for years in a debate about the study of science, including the behavioral and social sciences. All this began to change in the late 1960s (revolutions everywhere then) when some sociologists, anthropologists, and historians (usually on the fringe in the US and a bit more established in Europe) began to ask some basic questions. Why can’t science be studied just like any other part of social life? Science is created just like every other part of our collective life, right? Science is not superhuman (supernatural), right? We should explain science’s successes the same way we explain its failures, right? Turning this to economics we can conclude. Economic “science” is an effort to build up a picture of economic actions and decisions, how they are created, by whom, and how by the actors involved (generally not economists, although more and more so of late). Like all scientists economists tend to elevate their studies to high levels of importance. Economic anthropologists, sociologists, and historians have examined “economic science” carefully for the last 25 years. The behavioral sciences were formed around a core set of assumptions – human actions are part of nature, they obey natural laws of behavior, to understand them mathematics is essential, history is just the record of the playing out of these natural laws, and the purpose of social/behavioral sciences is to reveal, describe, understand, predict, and then control human behavior through these natural laws. As mathematics and other areas of science and the humanities have changed (e.g., relativity, problem of the observer (Heisenberg), quantum mechanics, chaos theory and math) the social/behavioral sciences have changed. Some changed little (e.g., anthropology) since their matrices already included many of the notions from the beginning. Others have changed little because their practitioners largely ignored what was happening around them in other sciences, politics, philosophy, etc. Economics fits within the latter group, along with psychology.
Again, both Bob and Ken are so busy defending themselves they are completely missing the crucial point I have been trying to convey to them. I’m not trying to defend my own expertise, let alone ability, which is hardly sufficient to induce hubris given how impossible I am finding it to communicate this simplest of ideas: that science has got the devil on its back, and while it won’t look back (for fear of being wrong, like we all are sometimes?) it will never see it. Nor am I the only one saying this: cf. Plato’s story of the cave.
In some ways historians are the people one most expects to be wiling to look back, but Bob admits his focus is on what people have said, not on trying to get under their skin to see why they were saying it. Had he followed my clue that Adam Smith’s mentor was David Hume, he might have realised why and how, in post-Reformation Britain, fortune-seeking Hume changed the course of scientific, moral and political methodology by the philosophical decision to refuse to accept the existence and force of energy (wind, spirit) he couldn’t see. Put it back and not only does science provide an explanation of the reality and possibilities of communication Hume denied, but physics becomes much simpler and its evolutionary potential makes a great deal more sense.
But hubris? I realised what I have just said back in 1958 and still I cannot get people far cleverer than myself to look at and learn from the reality of all this for themselves. The fact that I can play a few folk songs and hymns on the piano doesn’t leave me under any illusions that I am on a par with concert pianists: in fact quite the opposite: I understand what is involved sufficiently to really appreciate their achievements. Whereas doubtless they would look down on the significance of little me having learned – unlike most people – to understand both the language and the physics of music.
I’m not defending myself. I don’t feel under attack so no need to. Like many who post here Asad claims that mainstream economics is not a science and besides is hurting a lot of people and creating disasters everywhere. And therefore must be replaced or simply overthrown. But with what or by what? As I pointed out the social/behavioral sciences share a common starting point of basic assumptions. Replacing one such social science with another social science doesn’t alter these basics. Asad supports having a “science” of economics. Just not a “free markets” neoclassical one. But otherwise the basic assumptions I listed remain the same. My first concern is these basic assumptions. How well do the they help us understand what’s happening and deal with issues of resources distribution, economic injustice, the morality of economic actions, etc? Obviously which so called natural laws are claimed, which natural restrictions on actions are claimed to exist, and which factors are claimed to govern distribution of resources mark off social science theories from one another. So it seems the arguments made so often on this blog are simply disputes over which theory should guide economics. My question is different. It is – should there be an economic social science at all? Based on the historical record it’s difficult to find much evidence to support an answer of yes to that question.
“My question is different. It is – should there be an economic social science at all? Based on the historical record it’s difficult to find much evidence to support an answer of yes to that question.”
I agree with Ken’s statement. I base my conclusions on what people interested in economics have said about their subject since their attempt to turn it into a science along the lines of the dictum attributed to Lord Kelvin: “I often say that when you can measure something that you are speaking about, express it in numbers…; when you cannot express it in number, your knowledge is of the meager and unsatisfactory kind.” This dictum became the basis for a thorough going reform of the study of economics in departments of economics and business schools after the Second World War, as described in R. Khurana’s book, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands, Ch 6, “Disciplining the Business School Faculty: The Impact of the Foundations,” Princeton UP, 2007, 233-290, and Chapter II, “The New Paradigm” and III, “The New Paradigm Revisited,” in my book “ Management and Higher Education Since 1940, Cambridge University Press, 1989, which concentrated on developments in operations research.
These books violate Kelvin’s dictum because the arguments are not expressed in numbers but in prose based on historical research about the people who carried thorough reforms and criticized them. Is the knowledge , therefore, of a “meager and unsatisfactory kind.” For people interested in scientific method and econometrics, it would have to be, but for historians, who are preoccupied with people, and what they say and do, it is not. To the extent, moreover, that economics only amounts to what people say about economics, thoroughly researched books and articles following the strictures of historical method, should be of interest to any discipline that purports to guide economic policy. But the French dictum holds: De la discussion jaillit la lumiere.”
In their book, “Do Economists Make Markets” MacKenzie, Muniesa, and Siu set out to answer an apparently not simple question — rather than studying how economies are made and explained by the actors involved, have economists decided instead to create (to make) their object of study? Their answer is twofold, the first frightening and the second very frightening. Yes, the majority of economists have decided to cheat by inventing what they study not just academically speaking but in the wider world beyond academia. Sort of destroys the pursuit of knowledge, since you never did not know what you are studying, since you invented it. The second, and even more frightening answer in terms of knowledge is that even with that cheating the profession of economics lost control of what it invented, lost interested in fixing that loss, and simply became a “hired gun” working for dominant economic actors. But refuses to acknowledge this or accept any responsibility for it. The possibility, need for, and usefulness of an economic science is problematic and always has been. But to announce to the world you’ve invented such a science and that it holds great promise for better knowledge of economic actions and decisions when you know this is a lie is either delusional, criminal, or both. All scientists have blinders on. It goes with working within a closed “black box.” Scientists have to always be kept in check by non-scientists lest they find life within the box so fascinating and fulfilling they destroy good chucks of civilization by expanding the effects of the box. Right now two groups of scientists have no effective non-scientist checks – physics and economics. Physics is, even Steven Hawking now receiving once again some citizen feedback to check some of its more dangerous notions. Economics has no effective citizen checks right now. That’s a big problem.
I accept the significance of Ken’s latest comment. However, my question – or rather answer, for I see problems and solutions more readily than verbal questions – is different again, in that (in light of their history) it concerns the DEFINITIONS – or rather, current understandings – of science and economics, and the limitations of them, that Ken and Bob are taking for granted.
What Bob attributes to Lord Kelvin (1883?) is, I suggest, a paraphrase of David Hume’s 1748 conclusion, itself a paraphrase of Hume’s 1739-40 arguments:
“Does [some volume of divinity of metatphysics] contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact annd existence? No. Commit it them to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry or illusion”.
Hume’s starting position of rejecting what he can’t see, including God and the processes indicated by causes and effects, led to his reduction of science to observations scientists can agree on, and Dr Johnson famously disproving his rejection of causality by kicking a stone. Hence anyway methodological atomism, empty-headed economic man etc, but also the post-1800 significance of realising continuous but invisible electrical flows are both constrained and directed by circuits, the post-1840 Fourier enumeration/ Heaviside phase differentiation of circular flows, and the post-1938 significance of finding electrical switching circuits not only performing but directly representing logic. These utterly transformative discoveries led to post-war information science which Humeans, narrowly focussed on descriptive (non-performative) specialisations and (pre-numerate) language, still fail to acknowledge as science.
What I am saying, anyway, is that the root source of the problems in current numerical-as-against-real science and economics lies in Hume’s philosophical choice of atomism.
I have tried out the opposite supposition, that science needs to explain the existence of atoms and can do that only by starting with energy. Bob will doubtless say that, being a scientist (though on the evidence I have to insist that in Kuhn’s terms I am not a “normal” scientist), I am “wrong”. I can only say that, having tried it for myself, it works. I have found that, like Copernicus’s “revolution” or seeing the print of a photographic negative, it simplifies, explains and makes sense of the chaos presented to our unaided senses.
Curiously, looking up Bob’s reference to Kelvin, I found the latter developing the mathematics of topology and knots to explain atomic structure: the “knots” actually explaining the then-unknown stable types of sub-atomic particles.
I’m sympathetic to your concerns. Very much so. One thing I’ve found that helps is to not use the term discover. It can if taken literally take us off into dead ends. I prefer the term invent or invention. I base this on William James’ radical empiricism. Humans are bombarded with millions upon millions of basic experiences. How they organize these, use them, and explain them is invention. But an invention limited to some extend by the order, intensity, and mix of basic experiences. So yes the current versions of science are arbitrary. They are invented. That includes the social sciences, and economics. So at bottom revealing (as best one can) how the inventions are created and used is a primary task for me and others who study science and technology. From my encounters with economists over the years I am convinced that most of them do not agree with me.
Electrical batteries and switching circuits performing logic were “discoveries” in the sense of being observed when they were completely unexpected. It is perhaps the way of talking about such phenomena which is “invented”, and the task of science to find ways of talking (e.g. Heaviside’s electric circuit theory and Shannon’s information theory) which enable us to do justice to the phenomena without constraining them. Thus the four level dynamics of electric circuit theory apply at any scale of electrical flow and information theory measures what information flows are possible, not what they mean (apart from distinguishing data from corrective programming).
Asad’s blog was about the deficiencies in his education as an economist. My work centred on deficiencies in the education of scientists, who are as disinterested in the language they use as economists are in history. Hence the European promotion of Algol68, the grammar of which both required and enabled scientists to define their mathematical [or rather, dynamic computational] models unambiguously.
I’ll focus on three terms in your response to support why I believe your conclusions are incorrect. First, “observed.” Out of the perhaps millions of experiences humans could “observe” in any particular situation why and how were “electrical batteries and switching circuits performing logic” observed and not the many others possibilities? That event has a history, a process leading up to the focus on certain experiences and not others, and then of applying a certain explanation to the experiences thus selected. In my book, this is invention. Second, “information flows.” How is an information flow teased out of the literally thousands of other events going on at the same time? Or to use a simpler example, how do know a rock is a rock? How do we distinguish it from a diamond, a grain of sand, a gold nugget, a boulder? We do this through thousands of experiences in which certain experiences are built up to being a rock while others are not. To put it another way, we invent rocks. Finally, “unambiguously.” When is a decision, an event, a person unambiguous? At what point do the experiences of these things assume that character? This is invented also. My focus in seeking to understand what’s happening in the world around me is these processes of invention.
Thank you, davetaylor1,
“I’m not trying to defend my own expertise, let alone ability, which is hardly sufficient to induce hubris given how impossible I am finding it to communicate this simplest of ideas: that science has got the devil on its back, and while it won’t look back (for fear of being wrong, like we all are sometimes?) it will never see it. Nor am I the only one saying this: cf. Plato’s story of the cave.
In some ways historians are the people one most expects to be wiling to look back, but Bob admits his focus is on what people have said, not on trying to get under their skin to see why they were saying it. Had he followed my clue that Adam Smith’s mentor was David Hume, he might have realized why and how, in post-Reformation Britain, fortune-seeking Hume changed the course of scientific, moral and political methodology by the philosophical decision to refuse to accept the existence and force of energy (wind, spirit) he couldn’t see. Put it back and not only does science provide an explanation of the reality and possibilities of communication Hume denied, but physics becomes much simpler and its evolutionary potential makes a great deal more sense.
But hubris? I realized what I have just said back in 1958 and still I cannot get people far cleverer than myself to look at and learn from the reality of all this for themselves. The fact that I can play a few folk songs and hymns on the piano doesn’t leave me under any illusions that I am on a par with concert pianists: in fact quite the opposite: I understand what is involved sufficiently to really appreciate their achievements. Whereas doubtless they would look down on the significance of little me having learned – unlike most people – to understand both the language and the physics of music.”
Thank you, davetaylor1.
There is a simple solution:But to quote Frederick Soddy, “…So elaborately has the real nature of this ridiculous proceeding …(money issuance…)
been surrounded with confusion by some of the cleverest and most skilful advocates the world has ever known, that it still is something of a mystery to ordinary people, who hold their heads and confess
they are ‘unable to understand finance’. IT IS NOT INTENDED THAT THEY SHOULD.”
Thank you davetaylor1.
“…get people to look and learn…”
“Believe nothing merely because you have been told it…But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis,you find to be kind, conducive to the good, the benefit,the welfare of all beings – that doctrine believe and cling to,and take it as your guide.”- Buddha
Ken having just completely ignored the answer I gave him to him, that scientific method is about inventing suitable ways of interpreting what we discover and (by ignoring the keys) he cannot decipher, it is a relief to be able to thank you, Lucky, for your support.
As it happened, in my own education my interest in Catholic [i.e. biblical and creation] history had preceded my initiation into science, and I was already aware of Frederick Soddy’s achievements as a scientist (via the Cambridge Library’s “Background to Modern Science”) before you introduced us to his economics. His achievement in fact was to eliminate the last ambiguity (concerning the origin of isotopes) in the understanding of atomic structure, and his focus in economics was where I have all along been saying it should be: on “Fool’s Gold”, i.e. the ambiguity in and indeed evil obfuscation of the nature and meaning of money and number.
I would like to mention also my appreciation of the efforts of Tony Lawson, who has likewise offered ontology, surprising discoveries and comparative analysis as the way to get the Humean devil off our back: to find which key opens the lock. Re Bob Locke’s talk of “vanity”, “Of course [comparison] requires that the critical contributor in question is already in possession of a conception that is clearly superior to that teased out”, i.e. the key that opens the lock or deciphers the code where others don’t. (Contributions to the History of Ontological Thinking in Economics, in Cambridge Journal of Economics, Vol 39, No 4, July 2015, p.988). I may prefer language more straight to the point than Tony’s, but struggling to understand is perhaps necessary in learning to see reality for oneself.
Science is an important undertaking, but not because of “scientific method.” There is no single method for or in science. The importance of science is the result of there not being only one or a few “scientific methods.” Scientists look at the world somewhat differently because they focus on following the object(s) of study where ever they lead. Scientists construct these objects from hundreds if not thousands of formal and informal observations and experiments. “The Pasteurization of France” provides a clear picture of this process as regards the construction of Anthrax. For an equally clear example relating to economics take a look at “The Social Construction of a Perfect Market: The Strawberry Auctionat Fountaines-en-Sologne,” in the book “Do Economists Make Markets,” edited by MacKenzie, Muniesa, and Siu. Discover makes science out as a passive process, just sitting and waiting. But science is characterized by active construction of objects. By the invention of things, from Anthrax to Pulsars to perfect markets to mental disability. None of this is news if you’re examined relativity or quantum theory.
How tedious are these Kens who, having never experienced (or forgotten) a gestalt, refuse to believe anyone else has!
Ken at 6:38 am: “I’ll focus on … why I believe your conclusions are incorrect”, not on “Why do you believe your conclusions are correct?” – which not having asked, he clearly did not know, so had no grounds for disbelieving. Electric circuits were discovered because of accidental contact with a spoon left in a beaker of salty water, (see Edward de Bono’s “Eureka! An Illustrated History of Inventions”) and digital computer logic by Shannon’s gestalt, suddenly seeing the pattern of logical operations in the opening and closure of switches in the electro-mechanical automatic telephone exchange he was working on for the Bell company (with outcomes detailed in Jagjit Singh’s “Great Ideas in Information Theory, Language and Cybernetics”, ch. IX).
Now he is saying (despite the popular distinction between pure and applied science, Kuhn’s distinction between revolutionary and normal science, and Algol68’s distinction between data and three programming-related levels of reference to it in electrical computers actively symbolising, representing, communicating, logically manipulating and even initiating and guiding actions bits of information at all four levels in the single form of switching circuits): “There is no single method for or in science”!
I would like to quote Singh (ibid pp 102-4) at length on Tweedledum vs Tweedledee. Suffice that “when the logician takes our everyday notion of implication for further refinement he cannot afford to neglect the contingency when A happens to be false … [which generates not just a second but] four possible cases”.
Given that our world happens to be a spherical surface, is there not just one method of representing the location of any or all of its contents which does not involve distortion? Empty an expanding universe of all its contents and the same applies to that: “Hubble’s Bubble”. Theory at this level is applicable to everything at the cost of being empty. What the formal theory of latitude and longitude does contribute is an arbitrary but unambiguous partitioning of the surface into four sectors (NE, NW, SE, SW). and thus a starting point for knowing how and so where to look. Theory at the next level has to account merely for the evolution of something from nothing (hence when to look), where the four demonstrable stages in each level of real evolution are like the ten numerals forming the successive terms in decimal number representations. Theory at the third level (that of Kuhn’s normal science) now points to something in need of explanation, i.e. the four phases and relationship between them (arguably those involved in PID control and physically embodied in genetic structure); which explanation gives us some idea of what to look for, not an excuse for not looking. There is no need for a fourth level of science constructing static descriptions of the appearance of everything; better to look at the dynamic reality, which represents itself..
My own education included Alice in Wonderland misquoting Father William when “she had nver been so much contradicted in all her life”:
‘I have answered three questions, and that is enough ‘
Said [the youth’s] father, ‘Don’t give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I’ll kick you downstairs!’
Thanks for the interesting response. I’m not big on using extra words so I’ll just say this. Gestalt is just what I’m talking about. A gestalt in built. It’s not something that has to be. It could have never existed or existed differently. It shows clearly how experiences are organized and then have an explanation (a meaning) attached to the result. After the shock in the water the “shocked” could have sucked his fingers and pledged never to do something like that again. If you’ve learned one or another form of formal logic, then the opening and closure of switches in the electro-mechanical automatic telephone exchange might be fitted into that logic. Or it could have been a sign God is watching and you need to go to church more often. Being educated as an engineer, or in 19th century US as a “handyman” also might have led to seeing the opening and closing as an engineering problem. Reality is a gestalt built up. Thanks for giving this term back to me. I had forgotten it.
I’m not saying there is no single method for or in science. Scientists say it everyday. Just watch what they do and write. It’s not hard to see that they are not tied to and do not want to be tied to any one particular way of doing science. Observation what they do, and then then write up what they observe, share it, and then observe some more to change it. That’s one of the reasons science is so slow. For example when the debate over acid rain began it was 20 years before scientists reached the conclusion that the emissions from power plants (mostly coal) were its cause. Something that park rangers, hikers, forest managers, and city managers had though for 15 years. Reinforcing the point that science is just an enhanced version of something humans do already – observe and conclude.
Given that the universe is linear, is there not but one way of measuring speed. Turns out the universe is not linear and there are many ways (we know of) of measuring speed.
There should be a science of economics because without one the various comments, postings and books being written about this subject must be regarded as being arbitrary–that their limited organization of thoughts are without any overall plan, value or even without sincere meaning. (That is to say they are academically dishonest!) Further, when we discuss a matter in economics (or anywhere else for that matter), a person who is receptive to that discussion forms in his/her mind’s eye a picture or model of the shared situation. Consequently, due to our process of thought, the subject becomes logical, clarified and scientific. How can it be possible to make sense otherwise?
John O’Neill in 1974 wrote a book entitled “Making sense together: An introduction to wild sociology” in which he tried to say that all sense making on the planet (human and nonhuman) is the result of interactions, of relationships. The book did not do well as it was published just as the “only individuals matter” cultural turn was happening in America and much of the world. But this turn itself was after all created in relationships, in interactions. Economists were a big part of these creation processes. These interactions were going somewhere, they had a goal in mind. To make a world were microeconomics was paramount (utility maximization, market information, and individual choice scenarios, and all the rest). These became logical, clarified, and scientific not so much by “our process of thought” as by the interactions, the relationships that created them.
“Bob admits his focus is on what people have said, not on trying to get under their skin to see why they were saying it.”
Bob admits nothing of the sort, because it would violate the credo of the historian that PhD students in history have learned over the past two centuries in research seminars and classes on historiography. The historical source of this method is Leopold von Ranke’s statement ”
“that history should embrace the principle of wie es eigentlich gewesen (meaning “how things actually were”) … There has been much debate over the precise meaning of this phrase. Some have argued that adhering to the principle of wie es eigentlich gewesen means that the historian should document facts but not offer any interpretation of these facts. Following Georg Iggers, Peter Novick has argued that Ranke, who was more of a romantic and idealist than his American contemporaries understood, meant instead that the historian should discover the facts and find the essences behind them. Under this view, the word eigentlich should be translated as “essentially”, the aim then being to “show what essentially happened”.Ranke went on to write that the historian must seek the “Holy hieroglyph” that is God’s hand in history, keeping an “eye for the universal” whilst taking “pleasure in the particular”.[20]” Wikipedia.
Accordingly, historians certainly do try to get under the skin of people to see why they are saying what they say. I do that all the time, when, for example, I asked H. Thomas Johnson why he changed his view about the efficacy of management accounting; I reported and commented on his answer in my book, “The Collapse of the American Management Mystique,” (Oxford UP, 1996), pp. 176-92.
But historians in their craft are extremely careful about viewing people within the context of their time and shun judging them with values and ideas drawn outside their time and place.
Thanks for the clarification, and believe me, no offence was intended, but to quote you on April 23rd at 4.39 pm: “What I as an historian do is talk about people who call themselves economists and what they say about their endeavor.”
Incidentally, I too have Stafford Beer’s book (along with others) on OR, and given my understanding of what the subject was initially all about (like finding mathematically optimum search patterns for aerial location of submarines, analogous to the early problem in computing of finding the most efficient way of sorting data), I can well understand its inappropriateness for managerial definition of business operations in which human and/or data processing limitations are much more part of the problem. (In computing the solution was not sorting but indexing new data). My favourite OR guru was actually Patrick Rivett, who found the organiser of a wonderfully efficient search and rescue operation in a mining disaster was the telephone operator: the only person who knew where everyone else was.
It’s a Vanity Fair, which make’s it hard to tease the vanity out but necessary for comradeship and useful discourse.
The original OR was a fascinating combination of something that never works, optimization and solving important and urgent problems (such as how to get 2000 allied planes over Germany at the same time). Later optimization took over and puff the effective end of OR.
The hermeneutic circle is a difficult master. But it’s the most effective option we have for grasping how collective lives are invented. In fact, how the very notion of collective life is invented. This is something social scientists have forgotten over the years that historians have not. That with a few rare exceptions of instincts and of course the basic physical foundations of life (e.g. we all must eat) the organizations of the many “ways of life” on the planet are not the result of physical of physic laws unless one takes the notion that the strictures of time and life spans commonly called history is a natural law.
I dont support hanving a “science” of economics — I have argued in my paper on Deification of Science that scientific methods cannot be applied to study of human societies because we have free will, agency, can choose our destinies, and our actions are not subject to mathematical laws My own views on methodology are still evolving, but my paper on the methodology of Polanyis Grear Transformation, recently published in WEA journal Economic Thought provides an outine of a rather complex methodology which requires looking at the political social and economic spheres of existence simulataneously, and also looking closely at the linkages between theories and history. This paper is complex and I am still working on simplifying it. (asad zaman)
Asad, I accept your “don’t support” in the sense of your “not being an advocate of” a science of economics, but somewhat unwillingly I have to disagree that scientific methods cannot be applied to the study of human societies. The crucial point that everyone seems to be missing is that society is not just a set of interactions but also a set of relatively stable physical and linguistic institutions within which the interactions take place. The simplest analogy is a telephone, the characteristics of which – for the reasons you have given – do not enable you to predict the contents of a conversation, but do enable one to determine what is and is not possible by means of it. In short, communication science is applicable to evaluating and redesigning the institutional aspects of a communications system like an economy, even though neither it nor its limiting case of physical science (wherein forces convey one bit of information in their direction) can predict the outcome of its use.
Not quite. The “set of relatively stable physical and linguistic institutions” you mention are themselves the invention of interactions, of relationships. As are all formal communications systems such as telephone, internet, smoke signals, etc. The interactions run the gamut from just the interaction of ideas or theories to interactions of things like human bodies, buildings, autos, etc. In other words everything we are as individuals and societies are created (“performed” as communications scholars say) in relationships. And these are never ending and always be added to. This is the “hard” work of building everything from civilizations to PTA meetings. And from a processes stand point they all look the same. The differences are what is made and how those constructions are used.
I think we are at cross-purposes over the use of the word “construction” here. This is used by the [Humean] school of philosophy that argues there is nothing but what has been knowably constructed in human minds, whereas Critical Realism also recognises pre-human history, using the term “emergence” to describe properties of systems which are not possible until the previous level of evolution has been completed: usually more or less by chance. Thus telephone systems have been invented and constructed, but they couldn’t have been without the prior emergence and discovery of electric circuits.
Hume was a brilliant man but I think you over estimate his influence. When I use the word construction or make to refer to ways of collective and private life I certainly do not limit that process to Hume’s simplistic views. Construction involves human actors physically, mentally, emotionally, and every other way possible. It also involves nonhuman actors – oceans, mountains, factories, dictionaries, etc. And it is performed inside and outside the mind – whatever that is made out to be. Emergence is too simple since it assumes a linear process. And often making is not linear. Often it is chaotic, uncertain, problematic, unfixed, and wandering. Not just chance in the probabilistic sense, but sometimes backwards and inverted. So following from certain conditions to certain results (circuits to telephones) omits many events which mediate the process in many and unexpected directions, involving many actors not considered initially. And this process is neither rational nor irrational, although both rationality and irrationality have been and are created via such a process.