I was reading The Worst Enemy of Science which reviews Paul Feyerabend, another great teacher I forgot to mention. So tracking down some of his friends I got to Imre Lakatos who was also a philosopher of science and specialized in mathematics.
Then I came across this: ``The Milton Friedman neoclassical economics case study In August 1972, a case study of the methodology of neoclassical economics by Lakatos's London School of Economics colleague Spiro Latsis published in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science found Milton Friedman's methodology to be 'pseudo-scientific' in terms of Lakatos's evaluative philosophy of science, according to which the demarcation between scientific and pseudo-scientific theories consists of their at least predicting testable empirical novel facts or not.[10] Latsis claimed that Friedman's instrumentalist methodology of neoclassical economics had never predicted any novel facts.[11] In its defense in a three-page letter to Latsis in December 1972, Friedman counter-claimed that the neoclassical monopoly competition model had in fact shown empirical progress by predicting phenomena not previously observed that were also subsequently confirmed by empirical evidence.[12] The example he gave was a prediction of Chamberlain's monopolistic competition model that "the standard explanation for the Standard Oil monopoly was wrong", which he said had been theoretically predicted by Aaron Director, his brother-in-law, and empirically confirmed by Magee. But he failed to identify exactly what novel economic phenomenon was thereby positively predicted and confirmed. Lakatos invited Friedman to submit a discussion note based on his December 1972 letter to Latsis for publication in a symposium on the issue of the scientific status or not of neoclassical economics,[13] but Friedman never took up the invitation. Three years later, in 1976, Friedman was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics "for his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy".[14] Friedman's own predictions of an accelerating rate of inflation due to attempts to use expansionary monetary policy in order to attain an unrealistic employment target, as described in his Nobel lecture[15] are cited by others as an example of a novel phenomenon successfully predicted by neoclassical economics.[16] This research ultimately led to a break down of the popular belief in economics in the mid 20th century that there was a long-run trade-off between unemployment and inflation...'' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imre_Lakatos This morning I watched several videos of Krugman hawking his latest book, End this Depression Now. It was nice to hear part of his prescription was to send money to the states to hire back all the civil service people like teachers they have laid off. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
