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Date: | Fri Mar 31 17:19:18 2006 |
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===================== HES POSTING ====================
I've been reading the exchanges stemming from Buchanan's request for
citations to articles about the "sorry state of economics." I know this is
in bad taste, but the exchanges have provoked me enough to offer a
citation to some tangential work of mine. I do this because I think the
topic I have tried to address is of general interest.
I have an article that has been accepted by the Journal of Economic
Methodology entitled "Now You See It, Now You Don't: Emerging Contrary
Results in Economics." The article focusses on empirical literatures in
which an empirical result is first established, but later on conflicting
evidence seems to emerge. I have 26 examples in the article. I then
try to hypothesize competing explanations for this "contrary results"
phenomenon; nine are set forward in the article. I then try to "assign"
the nine explanations to the 26 examples.
>From my point of view, a major reason these empirical flips are of
interest has to do with how economists come to believe what they believe.
One (Friedmanesque and very naive) idea is that we believe what we
believe because the believed propositions have been subject to repeated
empirical "tests," and have survived. My examples suggest that empirical
results in economics sometimes (often???) flip-flop. This makes testing a
much "ifier" proposition. It also poses immense difficulties for the
conscientious economist who is trying to make policy recommendations based
on the empirical findings in the literature--he or she faces the
difficulty that established results may be contradicted "tomorrow."
I consider all this tangential to discussions about "the sorry state of
economics" in the following sense. I DO NOT offer this view about
"reversing empirical work" as a testimonial to some alleged "sorry
state." I offer it instead in the following spirit: we (as economists)
need to do the best we can to bring "the empirical facts" to bear on what
we believe. My work, if it does indeed contain some accurate findings,
testifies to how difficult it is to figure out in a compelling and useful
way what it is " the empirical facts" really are. So I view it as
"attempted consciousness-raising" about empirical difficulties, NOT as
some attempt to belittle or dismiss the entire enterprise.
Robert S. Goldfarb
Department of Economics, George Washington Univ
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