Introduction: Microeconomics as “normative science”

Chapter 5 catalogued the ways in which a standard set of classical mechanics experiments failed to measure up to Popper's rationalist ideal notion of science. Chapter 6 argued that hypothetical microeconomic experiments of necessity fail in the same ways as the classical mechanics experiments to be science in Popper's sense. But Chapter 7 argued that a set of actual microeconomic studies – the income maintenance experiments – fail in a whole additional set of ways to be science in Popper's sense. So if the income maintenance experiments are the best scientific studies microeconomists can offer, then microeconomics appears to be at best an undeveloped or underdeveloped science.

The nineteenth-century political economist John N. Keynes distinguished two senses of the term “science” in economics:

On Keynes's distinction, our argument in Part II so far has been that microeconomics is an undeveloped or underdeveloped positive science. In Chapter 8 we argue that microeconomics is also an undeveloped or underdeveloped normative science.