Patri's Journal: Current

This is Patri's current journal. It is kept on LiveJournal as patrissimo, but you are reading the archived copy on patrifriedman.com.

empiricism in economics (comment on this entry at LiveJournal)

Entry Date: 2004-08-04 14:12:00 Logged: 2004-08-04 14:16:38
Current Mood: Current Music: Astral Projection-Faithless - God Is A DJ (Astral Projection Remix)
(from a recent e-mail about Austrian economics, which is axiomatic and anti-empirical)
I am very pro-empiricism in economics. I see an important difference between a field like math and fields like econ, physics, chemistry, etc. Math is a game played with symbols, and deduction from axioms is often how you play the game. But the other fields are meant to describe the real world. Hence what matters is how well our models work, not just how elegant they are. Like many smart people, I am very attracted to elegant proof-building (my B.S. is in math), but I think its misguided to confuse that clean game with the dirty, messy task of trying to figure out the world.

Now its true that the universe sometimes works on simple rules, (ie the 4 forces in physics), and so axiom-play can be an effective tool. But I think this is much less true in economics than in physics or chemistry, and we should avoid the temptation of thinking the dismal science is as abstract as the hard ones.

I guess I'm skeptical of how much you can "find out more and more about reality" without constantly checking your assumptions and results against reality. ie how do you pick the assumptions to be made about humans? If not empirically, why will the results have anything to do with reality?
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