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Vladimir_M comments on Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields - Less Wrong
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James,
Nice of you to drop by and comment -- I still remember that really interesting discussion about price indexes we had a few months ago!
One thing I find curious in economics is that basically anything studied under that moniker is considered to belong to a single discipline, and economists of all sorts apparently recognize each other as professional colleagues (even when they bitterly attack each other in ideological disputes). This despite the fact that the intellectual standards in various subfields of economics are of enormously different quality, ranging from very solid to downright pseudoscientific. And while I occasionally see economists questioning the soundness of their discipline, it's always formulated as questioning the soundness of economics in general, instead of a more specific and realistic observation that micro is pretty solid as long as one knows and respects the limitations of one's models, whereas macro is basically just pseudoscience.
Is the tendency for professional solidarity really that strong, or am I perhaps misperceiving this situation as an outsider?
It may have more to do with compartmentalisation than anything else. Economists focus their attention on their own sub-disciplines, so the micro guys don't pay much attention to what the macro guys are doing. I'm not sure that's especially unusual in any intellectual discipline though.
Secondly, macro is what most people think of when they think of economics. So laypeople talk about the failings of economics when they're really talking about fairly small parts of the discipline in the grand scheme of things.
As to why economists don't pick up on this more often, I'm not really sure. Part of it is that debates on the epistemological merits of different methodologies don't really get a lot of play among the general public for some reason.
That's an interesting point. I will note that there is both bad and somewhat better macroeconomic research; the better research just focuses a lot more on having clear "microfoundations".