===================== 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 ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]