Lars P. Syll — The non-existence of economic laws

In mainstream economics there’s — still — a lot of talk about ‘economic laws.’ The crux of these laws — and regularities — that allegedly do exist in economics, is that they only hold ceteris paribus. That fundamentally means that these laws/regularites only hold when the right conditions are at hand for giving rise to them. Unfortunately, from an empirical point of view, those conditions are only at hand in artificially closed nomological models purposely designed to give rise to the kind of regular associations that economists want to explain. But, really, since these laws/regularities do not exist outside these ‘socio-economic machines,’ what’s the point in constructing thought experimental models showing these non-existent laws/regularities? When the almost endless list of narrow and specific assumptions necessary to allow the ‘rigorous’ deductions are known to be at odds with reality, what good do these models do?

Deducing laws in theoretical models is of no avail if you cannot show that the models — and the assumptions they build on — are realistic representations of what goes on in real-life.…

Lars P. Syll’s Blog
The non-existence of economic laws
Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University