As all students of economics know, time is limited. Given that, there has to be better ways to optimize its utilization than spending hours and hours working through or constructing irrelevant economic models. I rather recommend my students to allocate some time to study great forerunners like Keynes and Minsky, helping them to construct better, real and relevant economic models – models that really help us to explain and understand reality.The Great IS-LM Obfuscation
Lars P. Syll | Professor of Social Studies and Associate Professor of Economics, Malmo University
6 DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME ON RUBBISHSturgeon's law is usually expressed thus: 90% of everything is crap. So 90% of experiments in molecular biology, 90% of poetry, 90% of philosophy books, 90% of peer-reviewed articles in mathematics – and so forth – is crap. Is that true? Well, maybe it's an exaggeration, but let's agree that there is a lot of mediocre work done in every field. (Some curmudgeons say it's more like 99%, but let's not get into that game.
A good moral to draw from this observation is that when you want to criticise a field, a genre, a discipline, an art form …don't waste your time and ours hooting at the crap! Go after the good stuff or leave it alone. This advice is often ignored by ideologues intent on destroying the reputation of analytic philosophy, sociology, cultural anthropology, macroeconomics, plastic surgery, improvisational theatre, television sitcoms, philosophical theology, massage therapy, you name it.
Let's stipulate at the outset that there is a great deal of deplorable, second-rate stuff out there, of all sorts. Now, in order not to waste your time and try our patience, make sure you concentrate on the best stuff you can find, the flagship examples extolled by the leaders of the field, the prize-winning entries, not the dregs. Notice that this is closely related to Rapoport's rules: unless you are a comedian whose main purpose is to make people laugh at ludicrous buffoonery, spare us the caricature.
3 comments:
I think that there is great value in going after the crap in economics.
I think that there is great value in going after the crap in economics
You gotta try, I guess.
When Bill Mitchell goes after crap he states again and again, that it's the most representative crap, usually flowing from the institutions enjoying the most prestige and influence, and not some red herring piece from some hapless nobody. As far as I can tell Reinhart and Rogoff are of the first type, and yet they have legions of disingenuous defenders saying "even the best researchers can make a math error."
When the president of the US says, as he did on C-SPAN in '09, that the Federal government has run out of money, that's crap that no reputable economist would say. But you gotta go after it, anyway.
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