A few months ago I commented on Paul...
A few months ago I commented on Paul Romer’s argument on ‘mathiness’ in the economics profession, a term that has by now gained significant public visibility and even seems to merit a specific mentioning on Wikipedia. In this context I criticized Romer’s conception of “science”, which he defined as “a process that does lead to shared consensus”. This definition seemed awkward to me, not only because it applies to a lot of things, which are clearly ‘non-science’ (e.g. deciding which movie to watch), but also because it does clearly not apply to large branches of science (e.g. cutting-edge research in the natural sciences). Moreover, I argued that the close identification of “science” and “shared consensus” might foster and legitimize groupthink in the context of an uncertain and hard-to-predict environment. As you might imagine I was quite happy to see that Paul’s analysis is actually endogenously evolving and thereby possibly converging to my own point of view as can be assessed from one of his more recent blog posts.
“My conjecture is that the fundamental problem in macro-economics, […] is that a type of siege mentality encouraged people in this group to ignore criticism from the outside and fostered a definition of in-group loyalty that delegitimized the open criticism that is an essential part of the scientific method. Once this mentality got established, it fed on itself.”
Well done Paul, you are actually coming closer to recognizing intellectual closure as one main source of trouble in economics. Here is a guide for finalizing your tour de force: drop the “macro-” from the above statement, reread it and subscribe to this newsletter as a first antidote to further confusion!
All the best,
Jakob