Thanks for the lengthy explanation, David. I also thank you for 
attempting to articulate your position in ways that others on the list 
have been reluctant to do. Such a response to the issues that were 
raised makes it possible to move forward.

I have a preliminary comment and then some brief comments at particular 
points in order to help clarify my preliminary comment. The comments 
will sound harsh, but they are made in the spirit of furthering the 
discussion of the most fundamental issues in the field, which is the 
spirit in which I assume you wrote your post.

As I am sure you realize, the entire thrust of your argument hinges on 
the idea that "understanding" is a scientific task. Yet, so far as I can 
determine, you do not define "understanding." You write about 
"understanding how things work." This, as I understand them, is what 
engineers do. They study how THINGS work. Are you implying that 
economics is primarily or fundamentally about things; or is this just a 
manner of speaking? How do you deal with the claim that economics is 
fundamentally about people, or more accurately, about action and choice? 
Max Weber had a different use of the term "understanding" that would 
lead one to use very different methods than the ones that you say you 
approve.

The examples you give of "purely logical models" are not models of true 
action or choice. They do not represent uncertainty about how others are 
likely to act -- uncertainty about what others will offer for sale and 
actually deliver or be willing to buy and carry out their commitments to 
buy. Nor do they represent true imagination, creativity, or invention. 
They are models of robots who follow algorithms specified by the model 
builder. It is true that some of the models try to capture action and 
choice. But I presume that whether they do or not is not relevant to 
your explanation.


On 5/16/2011 1:45 PM, Colander, David C. wrote:
> Warning: This post a relatively long (sorry for that), and unless you 
> have been following, and are interested in,  the statesman/scientist 
> discussion, it probably isn’t worth reading.
> Thanks to all who have commented on my distinction of the art and 
> science of economics. I will try to briefly respond to some of the 
> critical comments, and be a bit clearer on my views.
> First my view:   I argued that it is useful to separate policy from 
> the science of economics, and that Classical economists in their 
> stated methodology tried to do that, and today we don’t do it anywhere 
> near enough.  That brought about a number of objections. One involved 
> the distinction between statesmenandeconomic scientist. As I used the 
> distinction, it had to do with what the goals of their analysis, not 
> whether they were listened toby policy makers. In my use of the term, 
> statesman,as soon as economists are doing more than analyzing formal 
> modelsor doing empirical work /for understanding purposes only,/which 
> meant any time they were advocating relating the model to suggested 
> policy in a particular fashion, then they were acting as “statesmen”, 
> not as economic scientists. When acting in this statesman role,  they 
> should not claim the imprimatur of economic science for their 
> particular interpretation. I think using the imprimatur of science is 
> done on both sides of the political spectrum, and it undermines 
> people’s belief in economic scientist’s objectivity. If that were 
> done, economists would answer most policy questions with the 
> following—Based on economic science, I don’t know; but based on my 
> read of economic science, and my sensibilities, and the following 
> values….., I have some views, which I am happy to provide you.
> It is for the person asking you to decide whether he wants your views. 
> But I would suggest that unless the person is broadly educated and 
> culturally and institutionally attuned to the area being asked about, 
> that the views are unlikely to be very useful.  (Example—asking a 
> Nobel Prize winning economist about policy is unlikely to provide deep 
> understanding about policy, since the Nobel prize in economics is 
> supposedly based on contributions to economic science, and policy 
> requires understanding of far more than that to be relevant. The 
> person may have that additional understanding, but there is nothing in 
> winning the Nobel Prize to suggest that they do.)
> The goal of the separation  is to try to carve out some small area 
> where economists might offer objective analysis (and as a group 
> agree)  that I suggest that the division between art and science is 
> useful.    Thus, I have a different interpretation to Harro’s 
> statement below:
> Any defense of a distinction between the science and the art of 
> economics serves, I would say, very specific purposes, and I would 
> warn historians to take self-serving distinctions made by political 
> economists from Senior to Robbins and after as the last word to be 
> said on the matter. Just as Senior's quote (and Mill's 1836) are 
> answers to the efforts of the Cambridge men in the BAAS to squeeze out 
> Ricardian economics as unscientific, so were Koopmans' derogative 
> review of Burns and Mitchell, or Friedman's emphasis on 'positive 
> economics' attempts to silence opponents with other policy 
> implications in their theories.
> I did not mean, nor do I think I said that Senior’s and Robbins’ (or 
> my) statements are to be the last word on the matter. Nor did I mean, 
> or say, that Classical economists got it right. I fully agree that the 
> art/science distinction has often been used as a “my analysis is 
> science, and yours is not” rhetorical slam. But that does not 
> invalidate the usefulness of separating out the two, and pointing out 
> when the separation is violated.
> So in response to those pointed out that Classical economists got the 
> split between art and science wrong, and they used the term “science” 
> to win arguments, I fully agree—but I see that as  all the more reason 
> to attempt the split and to define the science of economics narrowly 
> to include only what the large majority of economists consider science 
> and non ideological. (If that is the null set then so be it.)  The 
> fact that people fail to keep value judgments out of their  scientific 
> reasoning doesn’t mean that they should not try. In my view economists 
> should be clear as possible  in their writings as to the results they 
> see as coming from science, and the results they see as coming from 
> reasoning that doesn’t make the level of scientific knowledge. In my 
> view, little of what we economists know today reaches the level of 
> scientific knowledge, and even less of what Classical economists knew 
> reaches that level.
> What, in my view,  does meet the science level are pure logical 
> models—not applied to policy—but simply developed for understanding 
> purposes. The study of rationing models (constrained optimization) is 
> one, general equilibrium models are another, game theoretical models 
> with no application, are another—i.e., the mathematical relations that 
> form the basis of our models. Whether studying such models is worth 
> the effort is a separate matter, but in my view the study of those 
> models can be considered a part of science. Then there is empirical 
> work that meets science threshold for me—collecting data, analyzing 
> that data, and drawing inferences from that data about how things work 
> –and for no other reason than to understand how things work) fits in 
> here.
> If the collection of data is done with policy applications in mind, 
> then it (including the framing of the data)  is very possibly tainted, 
> and researchers doing data collection should make clear what their 
> policy views are, and point out that those views might influence their 
> interpretation of the data and what data they collected.  Empirical 
> work in Classical times was so far from the level of drawing 
> scientific conclusions from it as to make it non-scientific. That only 
> left the math models as science. Everything else was art. We didn’t 
> have the data or the technology to do scientific statistical work 
> then.  Today statistical and computational technology is improving, 
> making modern scientific empirical work in economics possible.  
> Economics has gone that way—with experiments (natural, lab, and field) 
> they are looking more carefully at assumptions and choices of 
> assumptions and models that may fit reality. But we are only just 
> beginning that work, and have much to learn about actually doing 
> empirical scientific economics.
> Ultimately, in my view “knowing something” involves connecting theory 
> with empirical evidence, and “knowing something in a scientific 
> manner”  involves connecting it in a way that current scientific 
> conventions say is sufficient for scientific knowledge. Those 
> scientific conventions change over time, and hopefully improve as we 
> learn from our past mistakes.  For a theory to be anything more than a 
> conjecture, you have to have empirical validation of the theory, and 
> even today, we are struggling with that.  In my view economists can’t 
> draw many scientifically validated inferences about policy from their 
> current theory and models, even though many do. In doing so they are 
> in my view, operating outside of science. That doesn’t make it 
> bad—it’s the best we can do, but we should pretend that it is 
> scientific when people will misinterpret that what we mean. I believe, 
> and have strongly argued, that economists should be a lot more careful 
> than they are about doing so. Nonetheless, I hold that while we can’t 
> draw any specific scientific conclusions about policy from models, 
> understanding the models, and empirically analyzing data as best we 
> can can still help us in thinking about policy. This argument serves 
> as foundation to my response to the to the discussion of famines.

This paragraph cannot be evaluated until you define THEORY. Presumably 
you do not mean an hypothesis about the effects of some policy. 
Presumably, you mean theory that helps one "understand how things work." 
Which takes me back to the absence of a clear definition of 
"understanding" -- and particularly whether this term implies the 
possibility or necessity that economics is about action and choice.

> Both John and Harro have objected to my discussion of famines. They 
> point out that famines are social phenomena that result from social 
> relations. I fully agree. Good economists—and I see Sen as a superb 
> economist—have shown that through their empirical work in a convincing 
> way to me.  It follows that if people starve in a society when there 
> is more than enough food to do around, then it seems reasonable that 
> the method of distributing that food should be considered as one of 
> the causes of that famine.  Nothing in what I said disputes that. I 
> find discussions of “free markets” that do not include a discussion of 
> property rights and social conventions underlying markets as having 
> nothing to do with science. It is rhetoric.

Rather than rhetoric, why would you not classify such studies as being 
incomplete or flawed? Presumably you have some specific works in mind. I 
do not know what they are. But you mus realize that the term "free 
market" almost always assumes the existence of private property rights 
(or do you have something broader in mind?). And although it MAY be 
appropriate to add something about social conventions, I am sure that 
you will agree that to determine whether this IS appropriate requires a 
judgment of relevance that must be made on the basis of which society 
one happens to be studying and over what period of time.

> It is precisely the type of discussion that, in my view, was meant to 
> be ruled out by the science/art distinction.
> That said, I believe that it could be useful to try to understand 
> famines in the constrained optimization model in which famine is 
> defined as a wage below subsistence, and one is clear about the 
> institutional assumptions one is making about the nature of the 
> constrained optimization decisions being made by agents in ones model. 
> In such a model starvation for some individuals can be default result, 
> and in that sense nature’s “solution” to famine.  Whether that is the 
> right model, and what policy should follow from that has nothing to do 
> with science –because it says nothing about whether the model is the 
> right one or not.  By putting the issue into a formalized constrained 
> optimization model, one can better understand the arguments, and make 
> better informed decisions about what policy one should undertake. But 
> the constrained optimization model itself doesn’t  lead to any policy 
> results, and when economists relate the two, they are violating the 
> science/art distinction that I advocate.

This does not seem like science to me. It seems like "play." To build 
models for sake of building them without any concern with how they will 
be relevant to the solution of specific problems (whether they are 
"right or not") is, to me, as worthwhile as trying to count the angels 
on the head of a pin. If this is what you regard as the economics of 
which one should write a history, then the history of economics is 
comparably unworthwhile, it seems to me.  [I may have misunderstood you 
here. The words are tricky.]

> Concluding, in my interpretation economic science is a relatively 
> small area where researchers are interested in understanding for the 
> sake of understanding alone. In fact, a person devoted to economic 
> science may well try to keep away from policy completely because it 
> means he or she has a horse in the race, which makes it much harder to 
> be as objective as possible, or to convince people that you are, even 
> if you think you are,

Better it is to have a horse in the race, trying to outcompete others 
for the prize awarded for making a contribution to the solution of a 
problem, than it is to try to disregard the fact that there is a race 
(or problem to be solved). More to the point, Mises dealt with the issue 
that concerns you by promoting an economics the goal of which is the 
evaluation of arguments for or against market intervention on the basis 
of the criteria employed by the proponent. He believed -- and I agree -- 
that such a goal was consistent with the goals of the major classical 
economists and neoclassical economics. That is , until welfare economics 
and mathematical economics came along and stole the professional show, 
economists were concerned with the whether particular policies would 
increase the human opportunities to consume goods. The early 
neoclassicals were also interested in distribution, as their responses 
to the socialists and Marxists showed. Does the pursuit of Mises's goal 
not solve the problem of "objectivity"?

> People will rightfully think that their policy views likely lead them 
> to explore a model that is more likely to lead to a policy result that 
> they favor.  That’s certainly the way I feel about many modern macro 
> modelers—DSGE modelers, who too often seem to come up arguing that 
> their models lead to policy results, when they are far too abstract to 
> lead to any such results. But it is also true  about earlier macro 
> modelers—I could be sure that someone from Yale would come up with 
> Keynesian results and  someone at Chicago would come up with “leave it 
> to the market” results.  If economics is to have a scientific branch, 
> that branch would not be associated with any presumption about the 
> results that come out of their analysis. (Where they do have policy 
> views, I interpret their coming to the opposite position than they 
> hold as of more interest than findings consistent with their views. 
> (Thus, when Jim Heckman came up with results that seemed to go against 
> his policy views, I paid a lot more attention to those results.) That 
> is the goal of separating the art and science of economics.
> Will separating art and science solve the problem of hidden values 
> sneaking in? No, values will always sneak in since the questions we 
> ask and the way we frame questions reflect our values.  But separating 
> the two will, in my view, do a better job of keeping ideology out of 
> economic science than the alternative of blending the art and science 
> of economics together as we do now.

It seems to me like your own hidden values have sneaked in here. 
Tradition demands, in my view, that economics remain concerned with 
trying to UNDERSTAND market interaction and its effects on consumer role 
well-being. The science of economics, traditionally defined, refers to 
the use of particular methods that are most suitable to achieving this 
task. Until theoretical welfare economics, particularly of the 
mathematical kind, was injected into the mainstream of the body of 
professional economics; the methods involved were those that would help 
one determine how government policies would affect individuals as they 
are conceived to act in the "role of the consumer." The goal was to 
determine whether a particular policy would benefit or harm this role in 
the long run. You want something different. But it seems to me that you 
have not clearly explained what you want ("understanding how things 
work"), that you have not dealt very effectively with the more 
traditional definition of economic science, and that you are promoting 
an economic science that is little more than play.
-- 
Pat Gunning
Professor of Economics
Melbourne, Florida
http://www.nomadpress.com/gunning/welcome.htm