Book contents
6 - Creating a ‘Scientific’ Economics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
ECONOMIC SCIENCE
When the Econometric Society was founded in 1930 to promote mathematical and statistical work in economics, its constitution echoed a new view of what it meant to be scientific:
Its main object shall be to promote studies that aim at a unification of the theoretical-quantitative and the empirical-quantitative approach to economic problems and that are penetrated by constructive and rigorous thinking similar to that which has come to dominate in the natural sciences.
(http://www.econometricsociety.org/society.asp#constitution, accessed on 20 February 2010)For the creators of the Econometric Society, to be scientific was to derive results rigorously, using mathematical methods to achieve greater rigour than would be possible using verbal analysis. Scientific rigour meant logical rigour, dictating that the economics be concerned with developing and analysing precisely specified mathematical models. Rigour in economic theory therefore meant simplifying problems so that they could be formulated as sets of equations, which could then be manipulated using suitable mathematical techniques. Propositions in economic theory could thus be as rigorous as the mathematical techniques that were employed. The assumptions might be arbitrary and abstract, but the results derived from them were rigorous.
This was very different from the view held by many economists, especially in the United States, in the interwar period, when scientific rigour meant ensuring that scientific theories were firmly rooted in the real world.
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- The Puzzle of Modern EconomicsScience or Ideology?, pp. 99 - 116Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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