Nicht erst seit der jüngsten Weltfinanzkrise wird über den Zustand der Wirtschaftswissenschaft diskutiert. Vielfach wird die Einseitigkeit der Disziplin beklagt und eine Pluralisierung gefordert. Allerdings besteht weder Einigkeit über die Form des anzustrebenden Pluralismus - ist also z.B....

Recent literature on Adam Smith and other 18th-century Scottish thinkers shows an engaged conversation between the Scots and today's scholars in the sciences that deal with humans—social sciences, humanities, as well as neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. We share with the 18th-century...

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...

Situational analysis (also known as situational logic) was popularized by Karl Popper as an appropriate method for the interpretation of history and as a basis for a scientific social science. It seeks an objective posit ive explanation of behavior through imputing a dominant goal or motive to...

A transcription of a 2019 conversation with Duke historian E. Roy Weintraub on his intellectual development over the 1980s from mathematician to economist to historian. The conversation also explored Weintraub's early and continuing attempts to forge new ways to study the history of contemporary...

A popular view of models among economists and philosophers alike is that all models are false, but some are useful. Models are frequently treated as convenient fictions, idealizations, stories about credible worlds, or "near enough" to the truth. But such a understandings pose serious questions,...

The aim of this paper is to present data to verify the process of mathematization in economic theory. For this we used two representative samples from three of the most in fluential academic journals in the years 1955-56-57 and the years 2015-16-17. Thus, a contingency table was drawn up,...

While some economists argued for macro-prudential regulation pre-crisis, the macro-prudential approach and its emphasis on endogenously created systemic risk have only gained prominence post-crisis. Employing discourse and network analysis on samples of the most cited scholarly works on banking...

The state of contemporary economics had been a subject of discussion even before the most recent global financial crisis. The one-sidedness of the discipline has frequently been lamented and calls are often made for its pluralisation. Nevertheless, there is neither a consensus over the form of...

How can an argument that is based on assumptions known to be false deliver any insightful conclusions let alone be used for policy recommendations? Over the years, a variety of concerns regarding (micro-)economic modelling and its relevance for real life have been expressed along these lines....