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nonage is self imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one s own mind without another s guidance sapere aude have the courage to use your own understanding is therefore the motto of the enlightenment laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large part of mankind gladly remain minors all their lives long after nature has freed them from external guidance those guardians who have kindly taken supervision upon themselves see to it that the overwhelming majority of mankind among them the entire fair sex should consider the step to maturity not only as hard but as extremely dangerous first these guardians make their domestic cattle stupid and carefully prevent the docile creatures from taking a single step without the leading strings to which they have fastened them then they show them the danger that would threaten them if they should try to walk by themselves now this danger is really not very great after stumbling a few times they would at last learn to walk however examples of such failures intimidate and generally discourage all further attempts dogmas and formulas these mechanical tools designed for reasonable use or rather abuse of his natural gifts are the fetters of an everlasting nonage enlightenment requires nothing but freedom and the most innocent of all that may be called freedom freedom to make public use of one s reason in all matters now i hear the cry from all sides do not argue the officer says do not argue drill the tax collector do not argue pay the pastor do not argue believe only one ruler in the world says argue as much as you please but obey we find restrictions on freedom everywhere but which restriction is harmful to enlightenment which restriction is innocent and which advances enlightenment i reply the public use of one s reason must be free at all times and this alone can bring enlightenment to mankind immanuel kant to all my brothers and sisters in afghanistan share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on x opens in new window x share on bluesky opens in new window bluesky behavioural economics and complexity economics 17 aug 2021 at 22 29 posted in economics 1 comment what is to take the place of neoclassical economics and its neoliberal policy offshoot there is no shortage of candidates grouped under the broad banner of economic heterodoxy some of these successor doctrines behavioral economics and complexity economics are examples of note take the neoclassical orthodoxies as a point of departure they therefore continue to define themselves in relation to those orthodoxies others avoided the gravitational pull altogether or as in the exceptional case of keynes made a long struggle to escape the behaviorists depart from neoclassicism by giving up strict assumptions of rational and maximizing behavior complexity theorists explore the dynamics of interacting agents and recursive functions both achieve a measure of academic reputability by remaining in close dialog with the orthodox mainstream neither pays more than a glancing tribute to earlier generations or other canons of economic thought the model is that of neoclassical offshoots new institutionalism new classical economics new keynesianism that make a vampire practice of colonizing older words and draining them of their previous meaning the dilemma of these offshoots lies in having accepted the false premise of the orthodoxy to which it proposes to serve as the alternative the conceit is of a dispassionate search for timeless truth once again pursued by relaxing restrictive assumptions in the interest of greater realism thus for example in complexity theories agents follow simple rules and end up generating intricate and unpredictable patterns nonlinear recursive functions give the same result the variance of returns turns out to be non normal and so forth but once the starting point is taken to be the neoclassical competitive general equilibrium model these exercises are largely drained of insight and relevance the behaviorists can tell us that real people do not appear to fit well into the portrait of autonomous selfish commodity obsessed pleasure seekers that is economic man the complexity theorists can tell us as arthur 2021 does is that a system constructed from confections of interacting agents may be unstable these things even the dimmest observer of real existing capitalism already knew james galbraith rwer although discounting empirical evidence cannot be the right way to solve economic issues there are still in my opinion a couple of weighty reasons why we just as galbraith perhaps shouldn t be too excited about the so called empirical or behavioural revolution in economics behavioural experiments and laboratory research face the same basic problem as theoretical models they are built on often rather artificial conditions and have difficulties with the trade off between internal and external validity the more artificial conditions the more internal validity but also less external validity the more we rig experiments to avoid the confounding factors the less the conditions are reminiscent of the real target system the nodal issue is how economists using different isolation strategies in different nomological machines attempt to learn about causal relationships one may have justified doubts on the generalizability of this research strategy since the probability is high that causal mechanisms are different in different contexts and that lack of homogeneity and invariance doesn t give us warranted export licenses to the real societies or economies if we see experiments or laboratory research as theory tests or models that ultimately aspire to say something about the real target system then the problem of external validity is central and was for a long time also a key reason why behavioural economists had trouble getting their research results published a standard procedure in behavioural economics think of e g dictator or ultimatum games is to set up a situation where one induce people to act according to the standard microeconomic homo oeconomicus benchmark model in most cases the results show that people do not behave as one would have predicted from the benchmark model in spite of the setup almost invariably being loaded for that purpose and in those cases where the result is consistent with the benchmark model one of course have to remember that this in no way proves the benchmark model to be right or true since there as a rule may be many outcomes that are consistent with that model for most heterodox economists this is just one more reason for giving up on the standard model but not so for mainstreamers and many behaviouralists to them the empirical results are not reasons for giving up on their preferred hardcore axioms so they set out to save or repair their model and try to integrate the empirical results into mainstream economics instead of accepting that the homo oeconomicus model has zero explanatory real world value one puts lipstick on the pig and hope to go on with business as usual why we should keep on using that model as a benchmark when everyone knows it is false is something we are never told instead of using behavioural economics and its results as building blocks for a progressive alternative research program the save and repair strategy immunizes a hopelessly false and irrelevant model by this i do not mean to say that empirical methods per se are so problematic that they can never be used on the contrary i am basically though not without reservations in favour of the increased use of behavioural experiments and laboratory research within economics not least as an alternative to completely barren bridge less axiomatic deductive theory models my criticism is more about aspiration levels and what we believe that we can achieve with our mediational epistemological tools and methods in the social sciences the increasing use of natural and quasi natural experiments in economics during the last couple of decades has led several prominent economists to triumphantly declare it as a major step on a recent path toward empirics where instead of being a deductive philosophy economics is now increasingly becoming an inductive science limiting model assumptions in economic science always have to be closely examined since if we are going to be able to show that the mechanisms or causes that we isolate and handle in our models are stable in the sense that they do not change when we export them to our target systems we have to be able to show that they do not only hold under ceteris paribus conditions and a fortiori only are of limited value to our understanding explanations or predictions of real economic systems ideally controlled experiments tell us with certainty what causes what effects but only given the right closures making appropriate extrapolations from ideal accidental natural or quasi experiments to different settings populations or target systems is not easy it works there is no evidence for it will work here causes deduced in an experimental setting still have to show that they come with an export warrant to the target system the causal background assumptions made have to be justified and without licenses to export the value of rigorous and precise methods is despairingly small taking assumptions like utility maximization or market equilibrium as a matter of course leads to the standing presumption in economics that if an empirical statement is deduced from standard assumptions then that statement is reliable the ongoing importance of these assumptions is especially evident in those areas of economic research where empirical results are challenging standard views on economic behaviour like experimental economics or behavioural finance from the perspective of model platonism these research areas are still framed by the superior insights associated with early 20th century concepts essentially because almost all of their results are framed in terms of rational individuals who engage in optimizing behaviour and thereby attain equilibrium while the mere emergence of research areas like experimental economics is sometimes deemed a clear sign for the advent of a new era a closer look at these fields allows us to illustrate the enduring relevance of the model platonism topos and thereby shows the pervasion of these fields with a traditional neoclassical style of thought jakob kapeller so although it is good that behavioural economists are rewarded nobel prizes and that much of their research has vastly undermined the lure of axiomatic deductive mainstream economics there is still a long way to go before economics has become a truly empirical science the great challenge for future economics is not to develop methodologies and theories for well controlled laboratories but to develop relevant methodologies and theories for the messy world in which we happen to live an economic theory that does not go beyond proving theorems and conditional if then statements and do not make assertions and put forward hypotheses about real world individuals and institutions is of little consequence for anyone wanting to use theories to better understand explain or predict real world phenomena building theories and models on patently ridiculous assumptions we know people never conform to does not deliver real science real and reasonable people have no reason to believe in as if models of rational robot imitations acting and deciding in a walt disney world characterised by common knowledge full information rational expectations zero transaction costs given stochastic probability distributions risk reduced genuine uncertainty and other laughable nonsense assumptions of the same ilk science fiction is not science for decades now economics students have been complaining about the way economics is taught their complaints are justified force feeding young and open minded people with unverified and useless autistic mainstream theories and models cannot be the right way to develop a relevant and realist economic science much work done in mainstream theoretical economics is devoid of any explanatory interest and not only that seen from a strictly scientific point of view it has no value at all it is a waste of time and as so many have been experiencing in modern times of austerity policies and market fundamentalism a very harmful waste of time an alternative to mainstream orthodoxy that has been discussed much lately is so the called complexity economics and its agent based modelling agent based models are formal models usually constructed using mathematical programming and performing simulations and artificial experiments with the intention of being able to more explicitly than in conventional mainstream game theory describe aggregate effects and dynamics of interacting individuals and socio economic structures without standardly having to assume equilibria non emergence walrasian auctioneers representative agents rational expectations etc etc agent based models come in different degrees of realism and are usually conceptualised as different kinds of self organising complex systems but one thing they all have in common is reliance on mathematical formalism in essence the agent based modelling endeavour in macroeconomics is an attempt at providing new alternative mathematical models where many of the bizarre and ridiculous known to be unrealistic assumptions in standard dsge models are replaced with other less unrealistic assumptions but the idea that mathematical modelling as such is always appropriate to apply is never seriously questioned and that s where i find it hard to follow one set of mathematical tractability assumptions are substituted for another but what if the mathematical modelling in itself is the problem what if the use of mathematical formalistic modelling in itself biases your research efforts in specific directions if it is the mathematical formalistic approach in itself that is the problem we only end up with different models based on the same unquestioned mathematical modelling strategy from my own critical realist perspective i can t see that mathematical modelling is the self evidently appropriate way to perform analyses of societies and economies the kind of closures demanded of the target systems for warranting the analyses i would argue simply often aren t there as a critique of mainstream economics yours truly fully appreciates the work done by the complexity economists but although their alternative agent based models in many ways are superior to the more traditional mainstream walt disney kind of models i am not convinced that their unquestioned attachment to mathematical formalist modelling is the right way to move forward in making economics a more realist and relevant science share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on x opens in new window x share on bluesky 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