I agree that first year is too soon, but students need to learn early on that economic thought has a history and that the content of the typical econ textbook, is not an established body of knowledge (as would be the case in undergraduate physics, for example), but an exposition of a current synthesis which is subject to quite radical revision over time.
This is obvious in the case of macro, but it's also true of micro. Game theory provides an example. It was thought to be an intellectual dead end when I first studied economics, then seemed set to solve all problems in the 1980s before the Folk Theorem showed that, in most interesting cases, anything can happen.
That’s completely right except for the bit about physics having an established body of knowledge. At best they’re just ahead of all the other disciplines.
I’m not sure that being both normative and descriptive makes economics so unique (at least not anymore). But economics does have a somewhat distinctive methodology — one that it shares with physics — in that it seeks to explain phenomena not monocausally but as a product of forces in opposition.
you get methodological individualism as the natural foundation of all social science. then general equilibrium economics can be criticized for some excessive assumptions, but mostly is the natural way to go.
I leave here the paragraph on reductionism of the linked article:
On the other hand, modern Science since Newton postulates (with immense explanatory success) the existence of an irrational, automatic, and objective matter, whose behavior can be described in mathematical terms. Within this framework, all scientific work is divided into two tasks: the discovery of the fundamental laws of Physics that can be mathematically expressed, but not explained (hypotheses non fingo), and the "scientific explanation" that consists of reducing observable phenomena to an application of the laws of Physics. The scientific explanation thus understood is recursive, with the most complex phenomena explained in terms of the simplest in a hierarchy (the so-called reductionist hierarchy) where (limiting ourselves to the field of natural sciences), Biology[3] is based on Chemistry and Chemistry is determined on Physics (the laws of Chemistry are mainly a consequence of the quantum properties of the electron orbitals). In fact, the "reduction" begins in Physics itself, where heat and its properties are explained as an emerging phenomenon in the so-called Statistical Mechanics that provides the micro-foundation of Classical Thermodynamics.
The other big problem with history of economic thought is nice illustrated. All of these guys have been dead for some considerable time, but courses in HET still seem to stop at Keynes. Actual research seems a bit more up-to-date, but still with a big lag, leaving most of the last 50 years untouched.
I agree that first year is too soon, but students need to learn early on that economic thought has a history and that the content of the typical econ textbook, is not an established body of knowledge (as would be the case in undergraduate physics, for example), but an exposition of a current synthesis which is subject to quite radical revision over time.
This is obvious in the case of macro, but it's also true of micro. Game theory provides an example. It was thought to be an intellectual dead end when I first studied economics, then seemed set to solve all problems in the 1980s before the Folk Theorem showed that, in most interesting cases, anything can happen.
That’s completely right except for the bit about physics having an established body of knowledge. At best they’re just ahead of all the other disciplines.
I’m not sure that being both normative and descriptive makes economics so unique (at least not anymore). But economics does have a somewhat distinctive methodology — one that it shares with physics — in that it seeks to explain phenomena not monocausally but as a product of forces in opposition.
Alas I don’t think that its methodological brilliance is well-understood. But I explain it here if you’re interested: https://zworld.substack.com/p/the-physics-of-philosophy
It’s an essay about physics but economics gets a shoutout and just about everything I say about physics applies to economics as well.
On this, I think that as soon as you put reduction as the core of epistemology:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nY7oAdy5odfGqE7mQ/freedom-under-naturalistic-dualism
you get methodological individualism as the natural foundation of all social science. then general equilibrium economics can be criticized for some excessive assumptions, but mostly is the natural way to go.
I leave here the paragraph on reductionism of the linked article:
On the other hand, modern Science since Newton postulates (with immense explanatory success) the existence of an irrational, automatic, and objective matter, whose behavior can be described in mathematical terms. Within this framework, all scientific work is divided into two tasks: the discovery of the fundamental laws of Physics that can be mathematically expressed, but not explained (hypotheses non fingo), and the "scientific explanation" that consists of reducing observable phenomena to an application of the laws of Physics. The scientific explanation thus understood is recursive, with the most complex phenomena explained in terms of the simplest in a hierarchy (the so-called reductionist hierarchy) where (limiting ourselves to the field of natural sciences), Biology[3] is based on Chemistry and Chemistry is determined on Physics (the laws of Chemistry are mainly a consequence of the quantum properties of the electron orbitals). In fact, the "reduction" begins in Physics itself, where heat and its properties are explained as an emerging phenomenon in the so-called Statistical Mechanics that provides the micro-foundation of Classical Thermodynamics.
The other big problem with history of economic thought is nice illustrated. All of these guys have been dead for some considerable time, but courses in HET still seem to stop at Keynes. Actual research seems a bit more up-to-date, but still with a big lag, leaving most of the last 50 years untouched.