On the problem of formalism in economics

Hodgson, G. (2006) On the problem of formalism in economics. Voprosy Economiki (3). pp. 112-124.
Copy

In his Reorienting Economics, Tony Lawson cites this magnificently appropriate quotation by Mark Blaug (1997, p. 3): Modern economics is sick. Economics has increasingly become an intellectual game played for its own sake and not for its practical consequences for understanding the economic world. Economists have converted the subject into a sort of social mathematics in which analytical rigour is everything and practical relevance is nothing. I believe that on this issue, Lawson, Blaug and I are in agreement: the victory of technique over substance is a chronic problem within modern economics. Although the victory of formalism can be dated to the 1950s (Blaug 1999, 2003), by the 1980s the problem had become much more serious. Because mathematics has swamped the curricula in leading universities and graduate schools, student economists are neither encouraged nor equipped to analyze real world economies and institutions.


picture_as_pdf
900705.pdf

View Download

Atom BibTeX OpenURL ContextObject in Span OpenURL ContextObject Dublin Core MPEG-21 DIDL Data Cite XML EndNote HTML Citation METS MODS RIOXX2 XML Reference Manager Refer ASCII Citation
Export

Downloads