Common Sense Economics
August 29, 2014
Everyone wears glasses of a sort. Even if your eyesight is perfect, we are all figuratively myopic because of the narrowness of our own backgrounds and worldviews.
Joseph Schumpeter addresses at some length this built-in bias to every researcher’s mind (History of Economic Analysis 1954). We all acquire an ideology of sorts that aids us in determining what is important and providing the preliminary vision necessary for undertaking a research project.
We have to be alert to the very idea that we all start from a biased position, and extra careful to maintain an open mind as new evidence and theories emerge.
Hence, pragmatic economics—particularly involving public policies—is necessarily more pluralistic than any single ideology might allow.
Perhaps this is part of what Krugman is getting at when he writes:
“[R]eal economics is the eclectic mix of ideas and techniques that seem to be useful, whether or not they have rigorous microfoundations.”