It's Time to Neutralize the Economic Mainstream Language

Journal of economic surveys, 2007

This paper sets the contributions to this volume in the context of widespread and serious doubts expressed by economists about the mainstream of their subject. Orthodox economics is increasingly dominated by sterile formalism, which refers only to itself. But the methodology of orthodox economics is under attack, and many economists are proposing an alternative agenda for the subject. This paper argues that there is a valid future for economics, but to reach it economists will have to abandon sterile formalism, stop invoking notions of 'rigour' which they do not understand, adopt pluralism and learn from cognate disciplines instead of trying to colonise them.

Review of Political Economy, 2004

South African Journal of Economics, 1988

The Rhetoric of Economics (Review Article)* J. F. N. LABIA*(2) THE TITLE OF PROFESSOR McCLOSKEY'S RECENT BOOK will make many economists feel uneasy (McCloskey, 1986). Surely no self-respecting economist ought to indulge in rhetoric? Is rhetoric not the province of politicians and professional persuaders who induce belief by mere eloquence and other verbal trickery? There are few economists who would be flattered if told that they were indulging in rhetoric. Do science and truth not begin where rhetoric ends? What are we economists if we are not scientists? We deal in facts and theories which may be tested in accordance with the canons of scientific method, not mere rhetoric. The only time we might indulge (with heavy heart) in the occasional rhetorical flourish is in our role as policy advisers to the lay public. Many of them are unwilling, and possibly unable, to comprehend the rigorous 'scientific' reasoning at the foundations of our policy recommendations which, by the laws of economics will inevitably lead to the state of affairs that they (the lay public or their representatives) desire. A little rhetoric may be used to persuade them that we economic scientists do indeed possess the means to bring about their desired ends; but we are not allowed, at least in our role as economic scientists, to prescribe those ends. The underlying economic principles are subjected to strict scientific testing in which rhetoric plays no part. According to the above view the relationship between the economist and his client is rather like the relationship between the consulting engineer and his client. The client tells the engineer what he wants, and the engineer constructs it using the principles of engineering. The rhetoric of the engineer is no more than his sales talk; it has nothing to do with the underlying principles of engineering. The approach to economics baldly outlined above is usually referred to as positive economics (Friedman, 1953).*(3) McCloskey in his recent book reverses most of the above propositions. According to him not only do economists use rhetoric as a means of persuading each other of the correctness of their theories, but this is precisely what they ought to be doing. 1988 SAJE v56(1) p48 Theories cannot be tested by bringing them into some kind of high-noon confrontation with the facts. Facts are in any case 'theory laden', and the fact-value independence (the so-called Hume's Law) does not hold. The task of economists is made more difficult by their not facing up to the rhetorical and literary nature of their discipline. A manifestation of this is the existence of what McCloskey calls an official and unofficial methodology of economics. The official methodology he calls 'modernism': Their official rules of speaking well, to which economists pay homage in methodological ruminations and in teachings to the young, declare them to be Scientists in the modern mode. The credo of scientific methodology, known to critics as the Received View, is roughly speaking, 'positivism'. It argues that knowledge ought to be modeled on the early twentieth century's understanding of certain pieces of nineteenth-century and especially seventeenth-century physics. To emphasize its pervasiveness in modern thinking well beyond science, however, it is best called 'modernism' ... . It is the attitude that the only real knowledge is, in common parlance 'scientific', that is, knowledge tested by certain kinds of rigorous scepticism. Philosophically speaking, modernism is the program of Descartes, regnant in philosophy since the seventeenth century, to build knowledge on a foundation of radical doubt (McCloskey,1986, p. 5). McCloskey argues, on the basis of concrete examples from the literature, that economists do not practice the official methodology. According to him economic praxis could be improved by accepting this and explicitly recognizing the rhetorical and literary nature of economic argument. Indeed the techniques of literary criticism can and should be used. The writings of economists are texts like other texts, and so the well developed methods of textual analysis may be applied. The modernist methodology ought to be replaced by an analysis of the rhetoric of economics, of how economists persuade; although he makes it clear that he is opposed to any 'systematic' methodology. Systematic methodologies are bound to be oppressive and misleading: Being reasonable is weighing and considering all reasons, not the reasons that some methodology or epistemology or logic claims to be stations of the cross along the one path to justified True Belief. A methodology that claims the historical dialectic or the hypothetico-deductive model or historical verstehen or any one style of giving reasons to be The One is probably unreasonable. The reasonable rhetorician cannot write down his rules. They are numberless, because they cover all reasons, and bromidic, because they cover all circumstances. Above all they change (p. 52). McCloskey advances three major propositions. The first is that modernism is an irrelevant and possibly harmful doctrine. The second is that economists do not, in the practice of their discipline, obey modernist prescriptions, they merely pay lip service to them; consequently modernism has had little effect on the substance of economics. The third is that economics 1988 SAJE v56(1) p49 is fundamentally a literary subject and that economists use rhetorical methods rather than scientific testing in their attempts to convince themselves and one another of the correctness of their theories. Furthermore, this is according to him what they ought to be doing. Unfortunately they have to practice this approach surreptitiously, because it is proscribed by the official methodology, 8 The publication of Kuhn's (1970) path breaking book has changed all this. 9 Cf. Chapter 10 of McCloskey for the benefits that he believes would follow from his rhetorical cure for modernism in economics. 10 Chapter 8, The Unexamined Rhetoric of Economic Quantification, and chapter 9, The Rhetoric of Significant Tests both criticize the way that quantitative methods are used in economic analysis. McCloskey is particularly critical of the emphasis in econometrics on sampling error rather than specification error (p. 162).

Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics, 2011

American Political Science Review, 1987

Mpra Paper, 2009

This paper is the outcome of a broad consultation on teaching in economics, organised by the UK-based Association for Heterodox Economists (AHE). It argues that a pluralist subject benchmark, derived from a pluralist code of conduct, is a prerequisite for the reform of the profession. Critical, pluralistic and independent thinking should be the primary requirement good economic practice, and pecific provisions should be made to recognise, promote, defend and guarantee this good practice in teaching and assessment alike. This is needed because of what Colander et al (2008) term the "systemic failure" of economics -the profession's inability, taken as a whole, to anticipate and understand the financial crash and recession of 2008.

2018

More and more often, confidence in the professional qualifications of individuals representing certain occupational groups which formerly were held in high esteem has started to erode. Dismissing scientific evidence and ignoring expert opinion has become a feature of political discourse around alternative truth. In part this is self-inflicted as various statements that are publicized with the aura of academic certainty do not stand up to closer scrutiny. Alas, this applies particularly to economics, which is often held up as the supreme discipline of social sciences. It suffices to take a look on page one of reasonably respectable printed media to recognize how important economics is in contemporary society. In this chapter, we highlight some issues from micro- and macroeconomics that are critical.

2005

When we organized a panel called "The New Economic Criticism" for the 1991 Midwest Modern Language Association (MMLA) convention, we were naming a phenomenon that we weren't entirely sure existed. Certainly there was no movement that called itself "New Economic Criticism"; in giving it a name, we were responding to our perception of an emerging body of literary and cultural criticism founded upon economic paradigms, models and tropes. Fortunately for us, this nascent movement took a firm hold in the 1990s, yielding exciting new work by both new and veteran critics, and establishing itself as one of the most promising areas of research in literary and cultural studies. This critical corpus, we soon discovered, paralleled a movement in economics that attempts to use literary and rhetorical methods to unveil the discipline's buried metaphors and fictions. During our work for the MMLA panel, we learned that each side was largely unaware of the movement in the other discipline. Indeed, even literary economic critics seemed unaware of each other's work, mining the same veins without acknowledging other prospectors. The potential for critical exchange, for extension and expansion, seemed relatively untapped. These conditions inspired us to organize a conference in 1994 that brought together scholars from both fields to engage in critical dialogue. This volume grows out of that conference. Our belief six years ago that economic criticism was a burgeoning and fruitful set of methods and discourses has been reinforced by recent developments: the first wave of economic criticism, which appeared during the late 1970s and early 1980s, has given way to a second, seemingly tidal wave of scholarship investigating the relations among literature, culture and economics. Why this explosion of new work? The reasons are multiple. Within literary studies, the critical pendulum has decidedly swung back toward historicist methods and away from deconstruction, semiotics, and the oher formalist approaches that prevailed in the 1970s and early 1980s. Historicist and culturally aware literary critics have therefore sought new approaches derived from the methods and texts of other fields, one of which is economics. Second-both a cause and consequence of that theoretical shift-the economics of academic publishing has forced literary critics to seek untrammeled pathways. Third, the re-emergence of cultural studies lends itself readily (as Koritz and Koritz note in their contribution to this volume, perhaps too readily) to economic explanations. This change, in turn, has inspired a converse crossfertilization in the work of economists such as Donald (now Deirdre) McCloskey and others, several of whom are featured in this volume. Fourth, the political economy of the 1980s thrust economics and its discussions of interest rates, stock market speculation, takeovers, leveraged buyouts, and so on, into the public attention as never before since the 1930s. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, just as physicists speak of "sweet" or