Science and Ideology in Economic, Political, and Social Thought

This paper has two sources: One is my own research in three broad areas: business cycles, economic measurement and social choice. In all of these fields I attempted to apply the basic precepts of the scientific method as it is understood in the natural sciences. I found that my effort at using natural science methods in economics was met with little understanding and often considerable hostility. I found economics to be driven less by common sense and empirical evidence, then by various ideologies that exhibited either a political or a methodological bias, or both. This brings me to the second source: Several books have appeared recently that describe in historical terms the ideological forces that have shaped either the direct areas in which I worked, or a broader background. These books taught me that the ideological forces in the social sciences are even stronger than I imagined on the basis of my own experiences. The scientific method is the antipode to ideology. I feel that the scientific work that I have done on specific, long standing and fundamental problems in economics and political science have given me additional insights into the destructive role of ideology beyond the history of thought orientation of the works I will be discussing

The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth: A Pragmatic Guide to Assessing Empirical Evaluations

An unsound claim can misdirect a field, encouraging the pursuit of unworthy ideas and the abandonment of promising ideas. An inadequate description of a claim can make it difficult to reason about the claim, for example to determine whether the claim is sound. Many practitioners will acknowledge the threat of un- sound claims or inadequate descriptions of claims to their field. We believe that this situation is exacerbated and even encouraged by the lack of a systematic approach to exploring, exposing, and addressing the source of unsound claims and poor exposition. This paper proposes a framework that identifies three sins of reasoning that lead to unsound claims and two sins of exposition that lead to poorly described claims. Sins of exposition obfuscate the objective of determining whether or not a claim is sound, while sins of reasoning lead directly to unsound claims. Our framework provides practitioners with a principled way of critiquing the integrity of their own work and the work of others. We hope that this will help individuals conduct better science and encourage a cultural shift in our research community to identify and promulgate sound claims

Science in neo-Victorian poetry

This article considers the work of three contemporary poets and their engagement, in verse, with Victorian science. Beginning with the outlandish ‘theories’ of Mick Imlah’s ‘The Zoologist’s Bath’ (1983), it moves on to two works of biografiction – Anthony Thwaite’s poem ‘At Marychurch’ (1980), which outlines Philip Henry Gosse’s doomed attempts to unite evolution and Christianity, and Ruth Padel’s Darwin: A Life in Poems (2009). Starting off with John Glendening’s idea that science in neo-Victorian fiction, if fully embraced, provides an opportunity for self-revelation to characters, this article explores the rather less happy resolutions of each of these poems, while in addition discussing the ways in which these poems perform the formal changes and mutability discussed within them

The Non-existence of the Labor Demand/Supply Diagram, and Other Theorems of Institutional Economics

The most famous and influential diagram in modern (neoclassical) labor economics is the model of wage determination by supply and demand. Using concepts and ideas from institutional economics, I argue that the theory of a perfectly competitive labor market is logically contradictory and, hence, the demand/supply diagram cannot exist on the plane of pure theory. Four other fundamental theorems concerning labor markets are also derived, as are implications about the theoretical foundation of the field of industrial relations and the economic evaluation of labor and employment policy. In this article I accomplish four things of significance. The first is to demonstrate that the core diagram of neoclassical labor economics - the diagram of wage determination by demand and supply (D/S) - does not have logical coherence and thus has no existence on the plane of pure theory. The second is to deduce this conclusion using a core concept of institutional economics (i.e., transaction cost), thus demonstrating that the institutional approach to labor economics has theoretical explanatory power. The third is to use the transaction cost idea to also deduce four fundamental theorems concerning labor markets and wage determination. The fourth is to identify the core theoretical foundation of the field of industrial relations. This discussion also yields important implications for the economic evaluation of labor and employment policy, as well as interesting insights on the history of thought in labor economics. Working Paper 07-2