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A summer reading recommendation for the #pluralism in #economics debate: George Akerlof, one of my favorite economists, has a brilliant article in the Journal of Ec Literature on methodological #pluralism. (It’s free to read – no paywall)
https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jel.20191573
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https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jel.20191573
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Akerlof argues that current day economics has a bias for “hard” results which severely limits questions which are covered by economics because only questions are acceptable which can be answered by a limited set of methods. 2/
He writes that the “emphasis on hardness is likely at the expense of importance”, hence important economic real world problems will not sufficiently covered by the profession, severely limiting its social value. 3/
According to him, the way economics is done today has a number of consequences: 1) A Bias against new ideas, 2) Overspecialisation and 3) the curse of the “top five” journals. 4/
Defining economics not only by the subject field, but also (and mainly) by the methods used makes economists “too accepting of existing theory and insufficently willing to be self-critical as a profession”. 5/
According to Akerlof, the current practice in economics prossibly prevents scientific progress in the sense of Kuhn’s Scientific revolution. If a paradigm not only describes the subject matter of a field, but also appropriate methodology, 6/
“observations that contradict the existing paradigm will be dismissed if they violate the prescribed methodology. The hardness police will rule them out as inadmissible evidence.” 7/
(What Akerlof says here is quite a strong attack. If a paradigm immunizes against the possibility of falsification would be “pseudo-science” in the view of Karl Popper. Hence, parts of economics risk of ceding being pure science.) 8/
Akerlof’s contribution should be read by all who claim that all is well in economics as a science. (We already now, not last because of @claudia_sahm‘s latest blog post that all is not well in economics as a profession…) 9/
