The Great Recession and the financial crisis of 2007-09 prompted ca lls for fundamental reforms of economic theory. The role of theory in economics and in recent economic events is considered in light of two recen t books: the sociologist Richard Swedberg's The Art of Social Theory and the...

The article explores the relationship between the main approaches to causality in economics dividing them into reductionist and structuralist accounts. The approaches of the Cowles Commission, Granger-causality, causality as invariance under interventions, and graph-theoretic approaches to...