The paper describes the background for my original "hedonics" paper (Griliches 1961) and discusses some of the issues raised by the subsequent literature on this range of topics. It goes on to consider some of the implications of this work for the measurement of capital services and connects it...

Economists seldom make explicit use of functional explanation, although they sometimes use it implicitly. Functional theorising has lost favour among social scientists in recent years, and few are now willing to adopt functional language. This paper argues that, despite some drawbacks, explicit...

In educating economists, we should sacrifice some of the more technical aspects of economics (which can be learned later), in favour of the compulsory inclusion of philosophy, political science, and economic history. Three reasons for these interdisciplinary studies are given here. In the...

Economic methodology has mostly adhered to naturalism, whereby the social sciences are akin to natural sciences and adopt the same positivistic methods. Anti-naturalism, by contrast, asserts that the social sciences are different from natural sciences and need to develop their own methods...

Dualism - the division of an object of study into separate, paired elements - is widespread in economic and social theorising: key examples are the divisions between agency and structure, the individual and society, mind and body, values and facts, and knowledge and practice. In recent years,...

Economists and other scholars have long sought to measure and analyze long-term trends and differences in social performance. Average stature supplements and lengthens data series on traditional measures of life expectancy and real GDP per capita. This paper presents a methodology for using...

This paper provides my reflections on the state of economic methodology and philosophy of economics as of the beginning of 2020 following the end a fifteen year co-editorship of the Journal of Economic Methodology with Wade Hands. It looks at how economic methodology and philosophy of economics,...