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5 - Accommodating Learning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2009

Esther-Mirjam Sent
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame, Indiana
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Summary

Why wait for Science to supply the how

When any amateur can tell it now?

The way to go away should be the same

As fifty million years ago we came –

If anyone remembers how that was.

I have a theory, but it hardly does.

Robert Frost, Why Wait for Science

This chapter contains a case study of Sargent's changing attitude toward learning. Rather than looking at his accomplishments from the perspective of orthodox philosophy of economics or conventional history of economic thought, I am searching for the story Sargent is likely to have told about how he arrived at the idea of learning with artificial intelligence and what resistances he had to overcome to put his interpretation of this concept to use. Whereas this type of analysis has been used in the previous three chapters in the discussion of Sargent's different interpretations of rational expectations, it is employed here to analyze how Sargent moved away from rational expectations. In fact, Sargent (1993) finally made a “call to retreat from … rational expectations … by expelling rational agents from our model environments” (p. 3) and “to create theories with behavioral foundations by eliminating the asymmetry that rational expectations builds in between the agents in the model and the econometrician who is estimating it” (pp. 21–2). Before discussing this move, I illustrate in section 5.1 how Sargent's social environment in the late 1980s was shaped by his involvement with the Santa Fe Institute.

Type
Chapter
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The Evolving Rationality of Rational Expectations
An Assessment of Thomas Sargent's Achievements
, pp. 124 - 162
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1998

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  • Accommodating Learning
  • Esther-Mirjam Sent, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
  • Book: The Evolving Rationality of Rational Expectations
  • Online publication: 18 December 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511528514.005
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  • Accommodating Learning
  • Esther-Mirjam Sent, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
  • Book: The Evolving Rationality of Rational Expectations
  • Online publication: 18 December 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511528514.005
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Accommodating Learning
  • Esther-Mirjam Sent, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
  • Book: The Evolving Rationality of Rational Expectations
  • Online publication: 18 December 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511528514.005
Available formats
×