Hmmm... 
 
Whenever I read something like Kevin Quinn's: 
 
>the British empiricists thought that all our knowledge 
>received its warrant in virtue of its reference to self-interpreting 
>sense-data. Modern neoclassical economics continues this tradition with 
>its naivete about the "data" that sort out true from false theories and 
>its pre-Kuhnian belief that the data are "theory-independent". 
 
I find myself confused. It does not seem to me to make... sense... :-) 
 
What could a phrase like "self-interpreting sense-data" possibly mean? 
 
Suppose that this year's budget reconciliation bill cuts $90 billion over 
the next seven years from income support for poor single-family household; 
that the elimination of the federal requirement that states "match" federal 
funds leads states to cut back an extra $40 billion, that the typical 
households whose income has been cut doesn't manage to replace much of that 
extra income by increasing hours spent in the paid labor force; and that 
the roughly 25% reduction over the next seven years in the income and 
spending of the poorest twentieth of Americans has dire social 
consequences--infant mortality up, hundreds of thousands of homeless 
children in the streets of America's major cities, cholera and typhoid 
making a comeback, and so forth. 
 
A neoclassical economist, looking at this hypothetical scenario, would read 
it as evidence that the neoconservative critique of welfare made by people 
like Charles Murray was largely incorrect--that the post-WWII AFDC program 
did _not_ lead the typical recipient to choose _welfare_ rather than 
_work_, and that the post-WWII AFDC program was a transfer program with a 
relatively small excess burden. 
 
How would this hypothetical neoclassical economists' analysis be flawed by 
its "naivete about the 'data'," by its "pre-Kuhnian belief that the data 
are 'theory-independent'," or by its acceptance of "the British empiricists 
thought that all our knowledge received its warrant in virtue of its 
refrence to self-interpreting sense-data"? 
 
Brad De Long 
 
 
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