tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18156735.post1146911786277863478..comments2023-10-29T17:43:27.054+07:00Comments on café salemba: What say you, economists? (Tirta)Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18156735.post-62169084974158779632008-01-27T05:33:00.000+07:002008-01-27T05:33:00.000+07:00This kind of debate has actually, more or less, su...This kind of debate has actually, more or less, summarized in the work of Pareto (1909) in his Manual of Political Economy and stated further in his Treaty of General Sociology (1916).<BR/><BR/>Economics, I think, studies logical decisions which are derived from given and known preferences. These given and known preferences are placed even before decision makers make their choices.<BR/><BR/>Here, it becomes difficult to conceive them as other than logical or rational. Indeed, "if you truly have preferences, you will automatically lose out if you do not pursue them!" just like Ramsey (1926) said.<BR/><BR/>To clearly mark this epistemological split between economics and other behavioral sciences, put it as psychology, economists have used the following axiomatic approach: if one accepts a few logical axioms, which are irrefutable to economists, then for each individual there exists a unique order of preferences which characterizes them.<BR/><BR/>Thanks to such axioms, then, debates on rationality have ended, the psychology or sociology of economics have exited, and mathematics has risen.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18156735.post-9527703476436623242008-01-26T03:41:00.000+07:002008-01-26T03:41:00.000+07:00the way i see it, any theory should be judged on h...the way i see it, any theory should be judged on how well it explains reality.<BR/><BR/>do economic theories explain "stuff" well? -- depends on who you are and what you want to explain.<BR/><BR/>i think that economics is spectacularly bad at explaining many economically important phenomena, and think it fruitful to take a good critical look at economic orthodoxy.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03523641844919145486noreply@blogger.com