ȁȄǿ Partʺ: Economics- Tacitly supposing that lack of tight short-run correlation between
changes in certain magnitudes discredits the broad relation that stan-
dard theory indicates between their levels. (Nowadays the technique
of cointegration is cultivated as a means of overcoming this fallacy.) - Mere eloquence that crowds out quantitative considerations. Hardin
duly condemns decisions dominated by sheer eloquence, whereas the
numerate outlook shows a concern for how big, how important, phe-
nomena and effects are (ȀȈȇȅ, esp. pp.ȃȁ–ȃȃ).
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Fritz Machlup (ȀȈȄȅ/ȀȈȆȇ, chap.ȀȂ) listed several signs of an “inferi-
ority complex of the social sciences,” including Behaviorism, Opera-
tionism, Metromania, Predictionism, Experimentomania, and Mathe-
matosis. Pressure to resemble the physical sciences does seem to be a kind
of tacit methodologizing.
Another, apparently, is attunement to fads.
In science, as everywhere else, there are few true creators, people able
to leave the beaten track and to come up with new ideas. It is very tempt-
ing to deem a problem interesting because half the people you know are
working on it. But truly deep and difficult problems promise no easy
returns, and do not attract people eager to publish. Poincaré makes a dis-
tinction between problems that nature sets up and problems that one sets
up (EkelandȀȈȇȇ, p.ȁȄ).
What one might call frontiersmanship is a related attitude. Conjec-
turably it tends to crowd out due attention to history, both of subject
matter and of research and doctrine in one’s field. In macroeconomics,
older and more straightforward doctrines, whatever their merits, were,
well, remote from the frontier. Other fields appeared more suitable for
the academic game. On the supposed frontier, business-cycle researchers,
whether belonging to the new-classical or the “real” school, tend to neglect
historical episodes helping to support (or to discredit) the monetarist
explanation of cycles. Ļey also neglect or slight the fact that competent
observers in widely diverse times and places saw reason to be persuaded
of the monetary nature of cycles. Yet this widespread perception surely
counts for something, especially since it does not stand alone but comple-
ments a variety of other evidence.
Also at work in contemporary macroeconomics is an attitude that I
do not want to label; it can exhibit itself. Referring to New Keynesian