IS ECONOMICS SCIENTIFIC? IS SCIENCE SCIENTIFIC? – Part 1

Part 1

ABSTRACT: The usefulness of models that describe the world lies in their simplicity relative to what they model. But simplification entails inaccuracy, so models should be treated as provisional. Nancy Cartwright’s account of science as a modeling exercise, in which fundamental laws hold true only in theory—not in reality, given the complexities of the real world—suggests that Rational Choice Theory (RCT) should not be rejected on the traditional basis of its lack of realism: that, after all, is to be expected of any simulacrum model. But when RCT has been extended to domains, such as politics, in which there is no necessary reason to expect systemic pressures against people who depart too far from the model, RCT is a simulacrum without any particular claim to expressing underlying causal laws. This cautions against the tendency to rest content with models and to treat their assumptions as if they were true. The question of whether economics and other social sciences are really “scientific” is often answered by taking some view of the natural sciences for granted, and then seeing how well the social “sciences” measure up. But an equally illuminating approach might be to see how a prominent challenge to conventional views about natural science affects our understanding of social science. Continue reading →