How Economics Professors Can Stop Failing Us by Steven Payson

Author:Steven Payson
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Lexington Books

Chapter 7

Scholarship, Though Beautiful, Cannot Save the Academic Economics Profession

THE CURSE OF TOO MUCH SCHOLARSHIP, AND THE NEED FOR SOME

I have previously written on how economists often violate principles of scientific inquiry, but for me and many others with the same or similar views, it would be an enormous amount of work to publish such ideas in any of the standard technical journals.1 And, if such work were, in fact, published, the audience for which it was designed would have no interest in reading it. A technical publication on the topic of scientific integrity in economics would require a detailed discussion referring to a comprehensive, scholarly review of the history and philosophy of scientific inquiry as it relates to economic thought. It would need to provide a review of the literature by Lakatos and Popper, etc., and discuss positivism, instrumentalism, descriptivism, etc. The vast majority of economists who really need to learn something about scientific integrity have no interest in any of this, and they would run for the hills at the sight of such historical names and philosophical terms that they have never seen before. That is, they might be able to hear a simple criticism that their efforts violate scientific principles, but they would not be able to hear it when it is couched in a scholarly paper about the philosophy of science, which they would ignore and avoid as something completely outside their knowledge base and most certainly outside their comfort zone.

Scholarly discourse thereby places yet another curse on economic thought that effectively precludes the consideration of the most important issue of all in economics—the issue of how to determine if the work performed by economists, and for top-ranked literature in particular, is relevant, valuable, useful, and worthwhile. Making that determination would involve philosophy; but most economists do not do study philosophy, and the ones who do only write to each other and have no effect on the rest of the profession.

Put another way, while the unscientific theoretical economists are having their own brand of self-gratification by sharing their beautiful models with each other, with no real intention of advancing progress in human understanding of the real world, are the advanced scholars of the history of economic thought so different? They, too, are having their own brand of self-gratification in their own way, by conversing in their own esoteric, philosophical language, and by sharing their own type of love for historical writings and for philosophical positions espoused by renowned writers of the past, like Adam Smith, Nassau William Senior, Tjalling Koopmans, etc. Are they not simply amusing each other and doing little more than that by studying bodies of work that are otherwise never considered or used by applied economists, or even by scientific theoretical economists, and most certainly not by policy analysts? To whatever extent such a scholarly group is perceived as being self-serving, the group will be taken less seriously by those outside of it, and will attract less scholars who actually do want to work toward improving the profession.

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