Economia
Economics has increasingly become an intellectual game played for its own sake and not for its practical consequences for understanding the economic world. Economists have converted the subject into a sort of social mathematics in which analytical rigour is everything and practical relevance is nothing.
At least three Nobel laureates have expressed their concerns. At a very early stage Wassily Leontief in 1982 objected that models had become more important than data: “Page after page of professional economic journals are filled with mathematical formulas … Year after year, economic theorists continue to produce scores of mathematical models and to explore in great detail their formal properties; and the econometricians fit algebraic functions of all possible shapes to essentially the same sets of data.”
In 1997, Ronald Coase complained: “Existing economics is a theoretical system which floats in the air and which bears little relation to what happens in the real world.” Near the end of his life, Milton Friedman observed: “Economics has become increasingly an arcane branch of mathematics rather than dealing with real economic problems.”
What happened after these prestigious complaints? David Colander lamented in 2009 that none of these prominent warnings “had any effect on US graduate economic education.” As Mark Blaug wrote pessimistically in 1998: “We have created a monster that is very difficult to stop.”
The problem is not necessarily mathematics per se, but the obsession with technique over substance. Arguably there is a proper place for some limited use of useful heuristics or data-rich models within economics. But what should determine their adoption is not their technical aesthetics, but their usefulness for helping to explain the real world.
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In Economics, What Calculates Isn't Always Right 11 May 26, 2015 11:20 AM EDT By Mark Buchanan Romer's disagreement with Lucas and Prescott, then, might actually be about what economics...
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Help Wanted: Economists Who Understand the Economy By Mary Theroux | Sunday November 25, 2012 at 5:15 PM PST 48 1 Ronald Coase Ronald Coase, the 101-year old, Nobel Prize-winning economist from whose essay, “The Lighthouse in Economics”...
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Book Description Publication Date: September 17, 2012 During the last two centuries, the way economic science is done has changed radically: it has become a social science based on mathematical models in place of words. This book describes...
Economia
Ciência econômica em crise
At least three Nobel laureates have expressed their concerns. At a very early stage Wassily Leontief in 1982 objected that models had become more important than data: “Page after page of professional economic journals are filled with mathematical formulas … Year after year, economic theorists continue to produce scores of mathematical models and to explore in great detail their formal properties; and the econometricians fit algebraic functions of all possible shapes to essentially the same sets of data.”In 1997, Ronald Coase complained: “Existing economics is a theoretical system which floats in the air and which bears little relation to what happens in the real world.” Near the end of his life, Milton Friedman observed: “Economics has become increasingly an arcane branch of mathematics rather than dealing with real economic problems.”
What happened after these prestigious complaints? David Colander lamented in 2009 that none of these prominent warnings “had any effect on US graduate economic education.” As Mark Blaug wrote pessimistically in 1998: “We have created a monster that is very difficult to stop.”
The problem is not necessarily mathematics per se, but the obsession with technique over substance. Arguably there is a proper place for some limited use of useful heuristics or data-rich models within economics. But what should determine their adoption is not their technical aesthetics, but their usefulness for helping to explain the real world.
Mais
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- "real" Or "mathematical" Economics
In Economics, What Calculates Isn't Always Right 11 May 26, 2015 11:20 AM EDT By Mark Buchanan Romer's disagreement with Lucas and Prescott, then, might actually be about what economics...
- Revolução E Evolução Da Macroeconomia
Revolution and Evolution in Twentieth-Century Macroeconomics Michael Woodford Princeton University* June 1999 The twentieth century has seen profound progress in economic thought. This has been associated, among other things, with the progress of...
- Ajude - Economistas Que Entendem A Economia
Help Wanted: Economists Who Understand the Economy By Mary Theroux | Sunday November 25, 2012 at 5:15 PM PST 48 1 Ronald Coase Ronald Coase, the 101-year old, Nobel Prize-winning economist from whose essay, “The Lighthouse in Economics”...
- Metodologia Da Escola Austríaca De Economia
“Austrian economics has generally been dismissed as extreme a priorism, cut off from the empirical data of the real world. The true situation is exactly the opposite. Austrian theory ruthlessly confines itself to an analysis of real life in the real...
- Como Economistas Trabalham
Book Description Publication Date: September 17, 2012 During the last two centuries, the way economic science is done has changed radically: it has become a social science based on mathematical models in place of words. This book describes...