The Elgar Companion To Recent Economic Methodology

Economic methodology has traditionally been associated with logical positivism in the vein of Milton Friedman, Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos and Thomas Kuhn. However, the emergence and proliferation of new research programs in economics have stimulated many novel developments in economic methodology. This impressive Companion critically examines these advances in methodological thinking, particularly those that are associated with the new research programs which challenge standard economic methodology.

Bringing together a collection of leading contributors to this new methodological thinking, the authors explain how it differs from the past and point towards further concerns and future issues. The recent research programs explored include behavioral and experimental economics, neuroeconomics, new welfare theory, happiness and subjective well-being research, geographical economics, complexity and computational economics, agent-based modeling, evolutionary thinking, macroeconomics and Keynesianism after the crisis, and new thinking about the status of the economics profession and the role of the media in economics.

This important compendium will prove invaluable for researchers and postgraduate students of economic methodology and the philosophy of economics. Practitioners in the vanguard of new economic thinking will also find plenty of useful information in this path-breaking book.

Contents:

1. Introduction: The Changing Character of Economic Methodology
John B. Davis and D. Wade Hands

PART I: ECONOMICS OF BEHAVIOR AND CHOICE
2. Behavioral Economics
Floris Heukelom

3. Experimental Economics
Ana C. Santos

4. Neuroeconomics and Economic Methodology
Don Ross

5. High-Fidelity Economics
Anna Alexandrova and Daniel M. Haybron

PART II: WELFARE AND MICROECONOMIC POLICY
6. Current Trends in Welfare Measurement
Erik Angner

7. Happiness and Experienced Utility
Luigino Bruni and Pier Luigi Porta

8. Applied Policy, Welfare Economics, and Mill’s Half-Truths
David Colander

9. Economics as Usual: Geographical Economics Shaped by Disciplinary Conventions
Uskali Mäki and Caterina Marchionni

PART III: COMPLEXITY AND COMPUTATION IN ECONOMICS
10. Computational Economics
Paola Tubaro

11. Agent-based Modeling: The Right Mathematics for the Social Sciences?
Paul L. Borrill and Leigh Tesfatsion

12. Computing in Economics
K. Vela Velupillai and Stefano Zambelli

PART IV: EVOLUTION AND EVOLUTIONARY ECONOMICS
13. A Philosophical Perspective on Contemporary Evolutionary Economics
Geoffrey M. Hodgson

14. Economics in a Cultural Key: Complexity and Evolution Revisited
Kurt Dopfer

15. Heterogeneous Economic Evolution: A Different View on Darwinizing Evolutionary Economics
Jack Vromen

PART V: MACROECONOMICS
16. Recent Developments in Macroeconomics: The DSGE Approach to Business Cycles in Perspective
Pedro Garcia Duarte

17. On the Role of Theory and Evidence in Macroeconomics
Katarina Juselius

18. Methodological Issues in Keynesian Macroeconomics
Roger E. Backhouse and Bradley W. Bateman

19. The Dismal State of Macroeconomics and the Opportunity for a New Beginning
L. Randall Wray

PART VI: THE ECONOMICS PROFESSION, THE MEDIA AND THE PUBLIC
20. The Spontaneous Methodology of Orthodoxy, and Other Economists’ Afflictions in the Great Recession
Philip Mirowski

21. Invasion of the Bloggers: A Preliminary Study on the Demography and Content of the Economic Blogosphere
Tiago Mata

Index