Ducks and Economics

Is another recommended blog. Her latest post has this good insight:

I will simply close by saying that within the discipline, a hard core of theory has evolved, with sometimes too little attention paid to the historical and institutional contexts that gave rise to the phenomena upon which the theory is based. Over time and in the absence of falsifiable propositions, the preservation of theoretical consistency has tended to dominate and counter trends that would otherwise tend to reconcile theory with reality. The isolation of theory from reality, bolstered by a liturgy conducted in a language that few outside the religion understand, may have, in turn, allowed certain aspects of the theory to be uncritically co-opted by certain groups to further their causes at the expense of the general public’s interest and general welfare.

New eyes, untrained and unbiased by indoctrination into the hard core of economic theory and its accompanying heuristics and corollaries, may well be exactly what economics needs to become a true and more useful science.