Little late picking up my postings, so if this is now off the
thread, I apologize in advance:
I agree totally with James Ahiakpor's point about fundamentals
and econometrics. It has gotten to the point in economic history
where available, obvious, convincing, thick evidence is often
brushed aside impatiently with the statement "That COULDN'T have
happened". Couldn't? Oh really? Why? "Because the model SAYS
it couldn't."
But the model is only as good as the theory upon which it is
based. And -- in economic history at least -- few are the researchers
who are as good at debating the merits of the theoretical background
of the study as they are at pronouncing an interpretation "proved".
I can off the top of my head cite three examples where economic
historians with VERY good jobs in economic departments at to;p
universities saw nothing wrong with an a priori assumption that
the observed wage equalled the MPL, and therefore could serve as
a proxy for productivity of individual laborers -- and were completely
oblivious to the existing literature on the number of situtations
in real life where that simply will not be the case. (A much-
heralded book, for example, argued in one chapter that a traditional
economy was becoming a "market" economy because wages were
converging -- then used the SAME wage data to argue in the next
that wages were a perfect proxy for MPL -- well, didn't argue it.
Just simply asserted it, one sentence, the famous "economic theory
proves that" sentence I am hearing more and more often.
Statistical analysis can be an extremely useful method for
making sense out of a jumble of stats. I do not think that
either econometrics or statistics BY ITSELF is the problem. THat
is like ranting at the computer for getting your billing statement
wrong -- the computer did not do that. A human being behind the
computer did. And it is the same with econometric or other
statistical models. They are being misused. They are being used
to be lazy about theory.
This ties in with what I keep seeing as a serious cultural
flaw within economics as a proefssion -- the unwillingness to be
publicly open about disagreement (except in the most bombastic
sense - as when an economic historian from a local econ dept.
informed a historians' seminar I was in that "Robert Reich is not
an economist." Oh right. He might DISAGREE with Reich, but
by any definition of the word Reich is certainly an economist!
Okay -- this is long, but there really is a history of economic
thought idea in here:
I would argue that econometrics first developed within a framework
of SEVERELY limiting the scope of what economics "was". It went along
with a national culture that similarly limited our perception of
what was "scientific" and what was not; what was "professional"
and what was not. And overconfidence in the ability of American
know-how (in this case, economic know-how) to fix just about any
problem.
What I see as the fundamental scholarly problem here is that
in the past thirty years economics has expanded to encompass much,
much more, deliberately. So basdically a methodology designed to
work within a very constricted and highly-defined framework is
being applied to a much looser set of constructions that simply
will not fit. The practitioners won't admit this, however. And if
you try to call them on it, they get huffy and say -- oh, you
just don't understand. (Like heck.)
That is -- economists have NO CONCEPTION that it has been
almost FIFTY YEARS since Paul Samuelson's dissertation. Fifty
years. Half a century. They approach all postwar theory as
either innately "right" or innately "wrong" and do not seem able
to conceptualize the framework within which different theories
and methodologies developed -- what questions they were asking and
answering, and how that shifts over time as the conversation moves
on.
What is desperately needed is a focus on the history of
American/British economic thought since World War II.
(The monetarist/Keynesian dispute of the early 70s neejds
to be viewed historically as well.)
-- Mary Schweitzer
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