Escape from Muddle Land — Peter Dorman

Let’s get the up-or-down part of this review over with quickly: Escape from Model Land: How Mathematical Models Can Lead Us Astray and What We Can Do About It by Erica Thompson is a poorly written, mostly vacuous rumination on mathematical modeling, and you would do well to ignore it.

Now that that’s done, we can get on with the interesting aspect of this book, its adaptation of trendy radical subjectivism for the world of modeling and empirical analysis....

While I have not read the work that Peter Dorman is criticizing, it appears to me that he ignores a major factor affecting economics, science and human knowledge as a whole. That is the ontological, epistemological, and ethical dimension, as well as work in philosophy (foundations) of science, logic, anthropology, sociology, and psychology. 

Tony Lawson and critical realists have attempted to address this in economic modeling from an angle that might be called "Aristotelean." This approach is one among others worthy of consideration. Lars Syll has written a great deal on this at his blog. However, it is called into question by the Kantian approach, which suggests the entanglement of the subject and object in knowledge. Cognitive science seems to favor a Kantian approach based on discoveries about the functioning of the brain and nervous system. Evolutionary biology also makes contributions. Understanding of these based on substantive evidence is still inchoate.

Without getting it the weeds, suffice it say that that the naïve commonsense view that observation is "objective" and not influenced by the subject is, well, naïve. It is possible that the work that Dorman is referring to is itself naïve but the need for reflection on ontological, epistemological, and ethical foundations is not, as well as the influence of scientific findings that affect these key areas. Keynes suggested this in his calling economics a "moral science" in criticizing Tinbergen's approach to econometrics.

There are different views concerning these foundation factors. They are not recondite either. A great deal of work has been done on such issues in many fields. But in general economists breeze right past them. Yet they involve some of the "enduring questions" that make up the quest for understanding ourselves and our universe. And they impact all aspects of life, including economics.

Econospeak
Escape from Muddle Land
Peter Dorman | Professor of Political Economy, The Evergreen State College