Economics Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Economics - Assignment Example At the core of the concern for methodology in economics is a concern on how economics acquire knowledge on the world and what methodologies economics use to expand the frontiers of that knowledge. Also closely related to the concern is the discipline’s notion of what constitutes science and what knowledge can be considered as scientific or what knowledge can be considered as lacking a scientific basis or foundation. According to Hausman (1989, p. 115), the literature on economic methodology is mainly concerned with confirmation or disconfirmation of theory and has usually revolved on whether a particular economics is good science. Milton Friedman had viewed that good economic theories provide correct and useful predictions while Paul Samuelson had upheld that economic theories must involve operational concepts that are equivalent to their descriptions (Hausman, 1989, p.115). For Hausman, however, these views are mistaken because many of economic theorizing have been conceptual explorations and theories do not necessarily offer empirical hypotheses. According to Hauman, the four approaches that have dominated the discussion on economic methodology are deductivism, positivism or Popperianism, predictionism, and eclecticism. Hausman (1989) associates deductivism with Johan Stuart Mill, the discussion on positivism or Popperianism with Mark Blaug, predictionism with Milton Friedman, and eclecticism with Donald McCloskey. Deductivism asserts that because so many causal factors can influence economic phenomena, experimentation is generally not possible and induction cannot be directly employed (Hausman, 1989, p. 116, 3rd paragraph). The deductivist solution is to derive inductively the psychological or technical laws and then deduce the economic implications from the laws that were discovered inductively (Hausman, 1989, p. 116, 3rd paragraph). Empirical tests are needed to check whether the empirically derived conclusions are applicable, whether the