Jay quotes Nordhouse:
>"Ultimately, then, the debate about future of economic growth is an
>empirical one, and resolving the debate will require analysts to examine
>fundamental structural parameters of the economy. Several critical
>issues must be examined. How large are the drags from natural resources
>and land? What is the quantitative relationship between technological
>change and the resource-land drag? How does human population growth
>behave as incomes rise? How much substitution is possible between labor
>and capital on the one hand, and scarce natural resources, land, and
>pollution abatement on the other? These are empirical questions that
>cannot be settled solely by theorizing." [p. 16]
The irony is that Nordhouse is right that the questions are "empirical
questions that cannot be settled solely by theorizing" but he glosses over
the inconvenient fact that the tradition of economic analysis is precisely
that of "settling" empirical questions by theorizing. Nordhouse is a
co-author with Paul Samuelson of recent editions of the textbook, Economics,
which contains several glaring distortions of empirically verifiable fact.
The facts have simply been "corrected" or omitted where they embarass for
the theory.
Is that any way to write a textbook? Would you trust such "scholarship" with
the fate of your world?
regards,
Tom Walker
