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Page 1 of 4

  • THE ECONOMIST AS SCIENTIST, ENGINEER, OR PLUMBER?

  • Huei-Chun Su, David Colander
  • Journal:
    Journal of the History of Economic Thought / Volume 43 / Issue 2 / June 2021
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    03 June 2021, pp. 297-312
    Print publication:
    June 2021

  • Some well-known economists suggest that a good economist should act like an engineer, a surgeon, a dentist, or even a plumber. These metaphors are useful in helping economists reflect the nature of economics and their role in society. But which is the most sensible one? This paper argues that economists should be playing all these roles and more, because economics is not a single entity, and each entity has separate goals, methods, and boundaries. To take this multiplicity of roles into account, this paper argues that in addition to the traditional boundary that delineates the disciplinary domain of economics against other sciences, an overarching boundary between economic science and applied policy needs to be recognized. It then examines Esther Duflo’s “economist as plumber” metaphor and suggests that a better metaphor for Duflo’s purpose would be “general contractor,” a metaphor that, if accepted, would suggest radical change in training applied policy economists.

  • Creative economics for a creative world: a comment

  • DAVID COLANDER
  • Journal:
    Journal of Institutional Economics / Volume 11 / Issue 1 / March 2015
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    28 July 2014, pp. 33-38
    • Article
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  • Critics of mainstream economics often argue that the mainstream does not recognize that the economy is dynamic, creative and evolving, and they base their criticism of it for its failure to recognize that. This paper argues that the mainstream does recognize that the economy is evolving, and changes its methods as new analytic technologies and computational methods develop. The paper suggests that a narrower critique of the mainstream is appropriate: It attempts to be too scientific, following a scientific rather than an engineering methodology. Thinking of applied economic policy as engineering, not science opens up new avenues of research, and will allow it be better deal with our complex world.

  • 2 - Post Walrasian Macroeconomics: Some Historic Links

  • Edited by David Colander, Middlebury College, Vermont
  • Book:
    Post Walrasian Macroeconomics
    Published online:
    02 December 2009
    Print publication:
    17 July 2006, pp 46-69

  • Summary

    In many ways the developments in the last 50 years in macro – Keynesian economics, the IS–LM model, and the New Classical Revolution – were deviations from Classical thought that took seriously the complexity of the macroeconomy, and did not see the macroeconomy as controllable. The Post Walrasian work discussed in this volume is beginning to take that complexity seriously, and is beginning to struggle with developing a theoretical foundation for a complex-system view of the macroeconomy. This chapter discusses aspects of the history of macroeconomics, providing some historical links for Post Walrasian work, and explores why that earlier work did not succeed.

    I begin with a brief review of Classical macroeconomics and I discuss the Neoclassical–NeoKeynesian synthesis, the New Classical Revolution, and the DSGE synthesis, and then I conclude with a brief discussion of why Post Walrasian work is more closely tied to Classical economics than is the DSGE synthesis.

    CLASSICAL MACROECONOMICS

    The consideration of macro issues has been around since the beginning of economics, but the actual corpus of work fitting into a course entitled macroeconomics began only in the 1950s, reflecting an evolution of thinking in macro that was closely tied to the Keynesian revolution. Before the Keynesian revolution, a formal macroeconomic theory was considered too complicated to deal with; it pushed the chain of reasoning beyond what the empirical evidence or the analytic structure could support.

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