Is this true? Of course economists (unless they sit on the Federal Reserve Board or something) can’t run controlled experiments in the real world. But neither can meteorologists; that doesn’t mean meteorology is not an empirical science. Meteorologists study the weather, take careful measurements, and eventually can identify causal connections between events with reasonable confidence. Empirically, not logically. Don’t economists do the same?
This doesn’t prove anything, but I took a Money and Banking course at the University of Baltimore in the early 90s which was taught by the chairman of the Economics department. Every time someone asked him a question that attempted to relate what we were learning to a real-world situation, he dismissed the question with “That’s an empirical issue”. Drove me crazy. That economist, at least seemed to agree that economics is NOT an empirical science.
Complicated question. There are different sorts of economists. Applied economists may rely on data alone (Xavier Sala-i-Martin and his “let’s try a billion regressions” approach) or constrain the empirical side a great deal by theory - make up the numbers as long as the add to zero (computable general equilibrium economics - GTAP is one example). The rest is in between. Econometricians are guided by a mixture of theory and data. Experimental economists are being challenged by field economists. Theorists are something else.
My wife always laughs at the line that an economist is someone who sees something working in practice and asks whether it could work in principle.
On the minimum wage issue, check out the various things linked to here, particularly the Landsburg piece.
As I’m sure Hawthorne will attest, classical Austrian Economics is deductively derived. You can read the process for yourself in Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action.
Ouch. Dogmatic much, Lib? I doubt I’ve EVER been so certain of anything that I would dismiss contradictory concepts in such a way.
Me, I’ve liked to treat economics as an empirical science but I too often see that, while it may be so, the level of data required to prove more than some basic and middling concepts empirically sets the user up for disaster. It’s a bit like playing with chaos theory…something you didn’t account for (and can’t effectively measure) can skew results in surprising ways.
Toss in the old saw about ‘humans should always be rational decision-makers’ and it only gets worse! Feh. ‘Humans’ and ‘Rational’ are words I doubt can be combined in a sentence with much reliability.
Example, with some humor: My mom, an economist herself (health care and health spending is her field), and with many publications, has a pin she wears for conferences, ‘If you lined up all the economists they’d point in different directions.’
That level of disagreement leads me to doubt the ability of economics, at the current level of sophistication, to prove/disprove things empirically.
No, I don’t think so. Dogmatic means “arrogant assertion of unproved or unprovable principles” (American Heritage). The principles I’m asserting are proved. That’s what deduction does — it proves things. I do not favor the empirical approach to economics because, as you can see from Mises’ and Hayek’s work, empiricism is an unreliable epistemology with respect to economics, in part because of the fact that, by the time you have collected your data, they are obsolete. And by the time you apply what you’ve learned, the principals from whom the data were generated might be of drastically changed status, such as broke or dead.
No they can’t, but assumptions (axioms) can be wrong. I can see no reason to not reconsider one’s axioms when their predictions conflict with reality (empirical data). Surely you’re not suggest that, are you? It was hard to tell from your post.
As to the OP, I’m not sure one needs to choose one or the other. Economics, as a study of human behavior, has limitations on it in terms of the types of experiments we can run. But that doesn’t mean we have to throw up our hands and realy on purt thought alone to reach conclsusions.
That’s why I gave a link to the book. You can see for yourself whether you think the axioms are weak.
Okay… first of all, deductive logic doesn’t make predictions, and neither does Austrian economics. In fact, it proves that reliable predictions about economics on certain levels cannot be made. Second, axioms are drawn from reality; that’s why they’re selected as axioms. And finally, it’s the empirical data that conflict with reality because the reality they represent is long gone by the time they are examined.
I read it (long time ago), and I don’t remember thinking the axioms were weak. That’s not to say that one or more might be found to be weak at a later date thru an empirical process (ie, testing their validity against real world data).
Because the Austrian school is based on deductive logic? Aristotle used logic to prove a vacuum could not exist. Zeno of Elea used logic to prove an arrow cannot reach its target. St. Anselm used logic to prove God must exist, by definition (the ontological argument: non-existence would be an imperfection, therefore the Perfect Being must exist, Q.E.D.). Just because a chain of reasoning is internally consistent and logical does not mean it has anything to do with the real world. That’s why science is based on inductive reasoning.
But, that’s as much as to say it’s impossible to derive any economic principles that apply to more than one specific moment/location/situation. If you believe that, why even try to form a science of economics?
I don’t know where Liberal learned his economics, but I got my degree at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. My professors certainly seemed to believe economics was an empirical science.
Had I avoided empiricism in my studies I would have flunked.
I see that giving you the book wasn’t a complete waste of time.
Excuse me? You mean your first premise is that there should exist a science of economics, and then you scurry about finding data for it? That seems rather self-serving, doesn’t it? At any rate, a science of economics on a local scale is very useful. That’s why there is a school of Austrian economics.
For absolute proof of anything, it is useless, as any scientist will tell you. (One can’t say with scientific certainty that apples will not start to fall upwards tomorrow.) But for deriving reliable knowledge about the world, it is the only thing that is useful.
And come to think of it , isn’t “axiomatic-deductive science” rather a contradiction in terms? I mean, there’s even controversy over whether mathematics qualifies as a science.