“Economics and the Big Wide World Outside”
With Prof Nancy Cartwright (Durham University, United Kingdom)
John Dupre has notoriously questioned ‘Could there be a science of economics?’ In his conclusion to the article by that name he explains that his answer to that question is a qualified, Very probably yes. First, my skepticism has been directed to theoretical, especially mathematical constructs in economics. I do not deny that there may well be much useful, if generally loose, causal knowledge to be had in economics….
I recently gave a set Schumpeter Lectures in Graz arguing that economics, which above all aims to be an exact science, can indeed be an exact science - but only in ‘small worlds’, that is in settings where the only causes of the phenomenon of interest are ones that economics knows how to model. But most real world settings are not like that. As John says, ‘The complexity of the phenomena investigated by economics is such as to make claims of fundamental lack of order at least superficially plausible.’ What then should we do? On rereading John’s paper for this event I realised that my proposal all these years later is a development of John’s original idea of ‘loose… knowledge’.
This is the topic of this talk. In order to help with the large world outside its borders, I argue, economics should forego its pride in being quantitative and exact. Instead, economics should export her rigorously-established principles as qualitative, inexact tendency principles. Though inexact once exported to the large complex world, the rigorous backing these principles receive in economics’ small-world models can be helpful in figuring when we can expect these tendency principle to obtain.
8 сен 2024
