Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 February 2010
Summary
Economics in its modern and mathematical form has grown into a brilliantly successful science. Unquestionably, it has. Its arguments are for the most part true, and even when they are false they are interesting. Its facts are true and rich and astounding.
People who disbelieve this — which is to say, most intellectuals since about 1880 — have not read enough economics. They imagine that a smattering of Marx will do. The English professor who has neglected Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, not to speak of Friedman, Galbraith, Samuelson, Hirschman, Heilbroner, Schelling, Coase, Becker, Fogel, Olson, Buchanan, Kirzner, or the other modern masters is missing a lot. He is missing, for example, the logic of unintended consequences. And he is missing the facts of modern economic growth. So I believe, as an economist and economic historian.
Yet the Methodology of economics, its declared theory about theory, is bizarre. Its declarations, if not its practices, lack good reasons. And so the good practices of economics lack rigorous defense. As C. S. Lewis the critic and taleteller put it, “Correct thinking will not make good men of bad ones; but a purely theoretical error may remove checks to evil and deprive good intentions of their natural support” (Lewis 1967, p. 72).
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- Information
- Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics , pp. xi - xviPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994