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...

Abstract We demonstrate how counterfactuals can be used to compute the probability that one event was/is a sufficient cause of another, and how counterfactuals emerge organically from basic scientific knowledge, rather than manipulative experiments. We contrast this demonstration with the...