Philosophy Research Seminar on Thought Experiments in Economics, presented by Professor Margaret Schabas, University of British Columbia
Event Details
- Date:
- Thursday, 23 July 2015
- Time:
- 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm
- Room:
- Room E303 Forgan Smith Building
- UQ Location:
- Forgan Smith Building (St Lucia)
- Event category(s):
Event Contact
- Name:
- Serena Bagley
- Phone:
- 52795
- Email:
- s.bagley@uq.edu.au
- Org. Unit:
- Historical and Philosophical Inquiry
Event Description
- Full Description:
- In contemporary mainstream economics, everything is a model, or so it would appear. There are many kinds of models, theoretical, empirical, econometric, material, game theoretic, behavioral, stochastic, and so forth. There are also many kinds of experiments in economics: laboratory, field, natural, quasi, and accidental. There are also rare appeals to thought experiments, and some that were clear candidates before the term was coined, especially in the early modern period.
If the puzzle about thought experiments stems from the belief that we can learn something new about the world just by engaging a train of thought without appealing to any new empirical findings, then economics seems a promising candidate. As the early neoclassical economists emphasized, economics is a science of the mind. The way that we know and understand the pathway of economic agency is by introspection on the supposition that we can extrapolate from our own deliberations to other minds.
This paper will demarcate thought experiments from models in economics, and argue that thought experiments and models are distinct types of conceptual tools. However, they differ more by degree than by kind, and fall on a continuum. There are some models that are near cousins to thought experiments, and vice versa. I will argue that thought experiments are in fact quite rare in economics, past or present. They are launched by a strong if not jarring counterfactual to a distant rather than proximate other world, and the journey the mind then takes back to this world is a familiar one. The paradigmatic case is Hume’s sudden doubling of the money supply, or Friedman’s helicopter drop. But the current rash of thought experiments in environmental economics, as posited by for example Martin Weitzman or Nathaniel Keohane, is a misnomer. We would be the better for finding a different name for models that speculate well into the future.
Directions to UQ
- Google Map:
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- Directions:
- St Lucia Campus | Gatton campus.
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