Economists failed badly both to predict and solve the Great Global Recession of 2008-2010 for two interconnected reasons. The first is that economics has moved too far away from its social foundations. The second reason is that the positivist economic methodology that economics follows has...

In this paper I review the main strengths and weaknesses of agent-based computational models. In particular I rationalise the main theoretical critiques, which point to the following problematic areas: (i) interpretation of the simulation dynamics, (ii) estimation of the simulation model, and...

Group thinking is the notion that natural selection favors what is good for the group or the species, not for the individual. Most mainstream evolutionary biology rejects this idea and natural selection is viewed as working on the individual’s genes to promote their own survival and...

This essay asserts that the mutual gains accruing from the exchange of goods between siblings can moderate the famous parent-offspring conflict, an issue of interest in evolutionary biology. The rationale combines basic concepts of economics and behavioral genetics, and fills in the gaps of...

The aim of this paper is to investigate in some detail the origins of Knight’s antipositism and to assess the main influences that brought him to a change in methodological perspective after 1921. As importantly, what follows is also an attempt to increase our general understanding of the...

Ever since the discipline of economics began, its practitioners have tried to infer laws, tendencies, causal relationships and associations about the real world. These claims are made through the construction of models – mathematical, statistical, verbal or a mix of all three. This note...

Theories that involve plainly false and even bizarre assumptions are argued to have an important role in bundling empirical facts in a way that allows these to be understood, handled and used as modules in the construction of mechanisms by economists with human cognitive limits. Absurd theories...

A core question addressed in this paper is: Can mainstream economic methodology be improved, and if so, how? In the process, it also considers the following questions: Is there much scope for improvement of intellectual property strategy? Is such improvement valuable? Can economics, and in...

Using papers published in 2003 and 2004, we measure the extent of math-free research in top economics journals. Of more than 1200 papers published in ten top journals, six percent met a weak criterion of math-free, three percent an intermediate criterion, and only 1.5 percent a strong criterion....

While leading figures in the early history of economics conceived of it as inseparable from philosophy and other humanities, there has been movement, especially in recent decades, towards its becoming an essentially technical field with narrowly specialized areas of inquiry. Certainly,...