{"id":12074,"date":"2015-09-10T06:58:00","date_gmt":"2015-09-10T11:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=12074"},"modified":"2015-09-10T06:58:00","modified_gmt":"2015-09-10T11:58:00","slug":"economists-vs-economics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=12074","title":{"rendered":"Economists vs. Economics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Economists vs. Economics<\/a><\/h3>\n

Ever since the late nineteenth century, when economics, increasingly embracing mathematics and statistics, developed scientific pretensions, its practitioners have been accused of a variety of sins. The charges \u2013 including hubris, neglect of social goals beyond incomes, excessive attention to formal techniques, and failure to predict major economic developments such as financial crises \u2013 have usually come from outsiders, or from a heterodox fringe. But lately it seems that even the field\u2019s leaders are unhappy.<\/p>\n

Paul Krugman, a Nobel laureate who also writes a newspaper column, has made a habit of slamming the latest generation of models in macroeconomics for\u00a0neglecting old-fashioned Keynesian truths<\/a>. Paul Romer, one of the originators of new growth theory, has accused some leading names, including the Nobel laureate Robert Lucas, of what\u00a0he calls \u201cmathiness\u201d<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 using math to obfuscate rather than clarify.<\/p>\n

Richard Thaler, a distinguished behavioral economist at the University of Chicago, has taken the profession to task for\u00a0ignoring real-world behavior<\/a>\u00a0in favor of models that assume people are rational optimizers. And finance professor\u00a0Luigi Zingales<\/a>, also at the University of Chicago, has charged that his fellow finance specialists have led society astray by\u00a0overstating the benefits<\/a>\u00a0produced by the financial industry.<\/p>\n

This kind of critical examination by the discipline\u2019s big names is healthy and welcome \u2013 especially in a field that has often lacked much self-reflection. I, too, have taken aim at the discipline\u2019s sacred cows \u2013 free markets and free trade \u2013 often enough.<\/p>\n

But there is a disconcerting undertone to this new round of criticism that needs to be made explicit \u2013 and rejected. Economics is not the kind of science in which there could ever be one true model that works best in all contexts. The point is not \u201cto reach a consensus about which model is right,\u201d as Romer puts it, but to figure out which model applies best in a given setting.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more at https:\/\/www.project-syndicate.org\/commentary\/economists-versus-economics-by-dani-rodrik-2015-09#xgLwXaG0L2E8thiJ.99<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Economists vs. Economics Ever since the late nineteenth century, when economics, increasingly embracing mathematics and statistics, developed scientific pretensions, its practitioners have been accused of a variety of sins. The charges \u2013 including hubris, neglect of social goals beyond incomes, excessive attention to formal techniques, and failure to predict major economic developments such as financial […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[244,2085,8874,614,8872,8402,8873,705],"class_list":["post-12074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-economics-2","tag-economists","tag-luigi-zingales","tag-paul-krugman","tag-paul-romer","tag-project-syndicate","tag-richard-thaler","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12074"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12074\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12075,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12074\/revisions\/12075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}