Abstract
What is a scientist? One answer: there are two kinds of scientists. Senior scientists are the ones who have NSF or NIH grants, and junior scientists are the ones who work for them. Of course, both have PhD’s in subjects their universities consider to be sciences. There are other and probably better answers, and the coverage of this answer is not complete, but it is not entirely tongue-in-cheek and will serve to set up the next question.
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Notes
See J. L. Heilbron, The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science (2003) for a number of articles on the emergence of modern science.
Walter Isaacson, Einstein (2007), describes Einstein’s and some others’ efforts during the former’s lifetime.
Barton Zwiebach, A First Course in String Theory (2009), presents the string theory variant of recent resurrectional efforts.
An example of pure isolation occurs in Andrew Mas-Colell, Michael Whinston, and Jerry Green, Microeconomic Theory (1995), 578, “the theoretical predictive power,” and 579, “a positive prediction,” in both cases of the Walrasian equilibrium model totally without reference to any empirical results (which probably are not possible and definitely not available). In a recent issue of the peer-reviewed journal Microeconomics (vol. 4, no. 1, 2012) all but one of the eight articles featured a new or adapted mathematical model. Three included experiments (one of them a prisoners’ dilemma), that is, games with rules supplied by the investigators. As a consequence this issue contained not a single iota of data involving humans behaving in a natural environment. The lead article looks good, but the data was published six years earlier.
Edward Learner, Macroeconomic Patterns and Stories (2010) and earlier references to primarily extrapolative methods such as leading indicators and forecast averaging demonstrate this failure of sophisticated modeling of most economic phenomena.
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© 2016 Benjamin Ward
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Ward, B. (2016). Scientific Demotion. In: Dionysian Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137597366_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137597366_12
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