LEADING ECONOMISTS CRITICIZE RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY & BLIND DEPENDENCE ON MATHEMATICS
In the wake of the financial crisis, a number of leading economists have criticized the current state of economics as a discipline, arguing that a fascination with mathematical modeling and a naive faith in the ubiquity of rational action led economists to miss warning signs. Because the U.S. legal academy is poised on the brink of a turn to social science, it may be an apt time for us to reflect on these lessons.
Letter from Professor Geoffrey M. Hodgson and other leading economists: http://www.feed-charity.org/user/image/queen2009b.pdf
The Great Mortification: Economists’ Responses to the Crisis of 2007–(and counting), Philip Mirowski: “Lesson 1: This Is What Happens When You Banish History and Philosophy …. the task is to recount these events as a sequence of otherwise avoidable tragedies, the first of which must be conceded to have been the exile of history and philosophy from any place within the contemporary economic orthodoxy. After a brief flirtation in the 1960s and 1970s, the grandees of the profession took it upon themselves to express their disdain and scorn for the types of self-reflection practiced by “methodologists” and historians of economics and to go out of their way to prevent those so inclined from occupying any tenured foothold in reputable economics departments. It was perhaps no coincidence that history and philosophy were the areas where one found the greatest concentrations of skeptics concerning the shape and substance of the postwar American economic orthodoxy.” [One might add other social sciences as well…]” ….
“Lesson 3: Rationality Doesn’t Begin to Scratch the Surface
One of the greatest ironies of the disputation was that a fair cadre of neoclassical economists had conceived of an enthusiasm for “behavioral economics” early in the new millennium, by which they meant minor emendations to conventional microeconomics informed through putative recourse to the findings of psychologists. It should be noted they almost never once regarded economists as suitable grist for their behavioral mills.”
ttp://www.iasc-culture.org/publications_article_2010_Summer_mirowski.php
AND the PETITION signed by many leading scholars: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/revitalizing_economics/?e