Many of Boettke's criticisms of formalist economics are justified. However, he defines it so broadly that it becomes practically synonymous with mainstream economics. Yet he blames it for the specific sins of formalist economics more narrowly defined. And since he treats Austrian economics as...

Why was the Fed so inflationary in 1965-79? No single explanation suffices. Forecast errors and poor operating procedures played at most a minor role. Unwillingness to accept greater interest-rate variation and cognitive errors played a greater role. Political pressures also played a role, but,...

Economists do not communicate efficiently and methodologists<p> should expand their bailiwick to deal with this and with similar<p> practical problems. Both the quality of and the professional<p> prestige associated with popular writing should be enhanced. Aca-<p> demic economists need to pay more attention...</p></p></p></p>

In 1956 when Friedman published his "The Quantity Theory of Money: A Restatement" he faced a daunting task because of the widespread hostility to the quantity theory. This paper looks at the rhetoric (in the non-pejorative sense of the term) that he used to overcome this obstacle, and at some of...

How justified is the charge that ideology strongly influences the allegedly objective opinions of economists? An analysis of a new survey of AEA members and of surveys by Fuchs et al of labor economists and public economists shows that value judgments and judgments about the government's...

This contribution to a Festschrift for Warren Samuels argues that in giving policy advice economists should seek diversification and consider the probability of error, and also the loss function and risk aversion. And since advocacy of a theory is in a relevant way like a policy decision, the...

The principle that theories should be tested by the accuracy of their predictions but not by the realism of their assumptions needs to be qualified. As a practical matter we often need to evaluate the applicability of theories to cases for which they have not been tested by their predictions....

Before condemning data mining one should distinguish between objective and biased data mining. The former is commendable. Even biased data mining is appropriate when used to illustrate and not to test hypotheses. In the context of testing, the problem with biased data mining arises not from the...

How can one tell whether academic research influences macroeconomic policy? One possibility is to look at government documents that set forth macro policy. This paper looks for such traces in U.S., European and Japanese documents. Because of ease of access it focuses on U.S. documents. Numerous...