"Because of advances in methods and theory, archaeology now addresses issues central to debates in the social sciences in a far more sophisticated manner than ever before. Coupled with methodological innovations, multiscalar archaeological studies around the world have produced a wealth of new data that provide a unique perspective on long-term changes in human societies, as they document variation in human behavior and institutions before the modern era. We illustrate these points with three examples: changes in human settlements, the roles of markets and states in deep history, and changes in standards of living. Alternative pathways toward complexity suggest how common processes may operate under contrasting ecologies, populations, and economic integration."

Have I really not bookmarked this before?

Farmer's responses (in the comments) really do not address the issue, they just re-state his position.

"Instrumental variable (IV) methods are widely used to identify causal effects in models with endogenous explanatory variables. Often the instrument exclusion restriction that underlies the validity of the usual IV inference is suspect; that is, instruments are only plausibly exogenous. We present practical methods for performing inference while relaxing the exclusion restriction. We illustrate the approaches with empirical examples that examine the effect of 401(k) participation on asset accumulation, price elasticity of demand for margarine, and returns to schooling. We find that inference is informative even with a substantial relaxation of the exclusion restriction in two of the three cases."

"[International political economy] should transition to “third wave” scholarship. This transition is necessary because the approach that dominates current American IPE scholarship, Open Economy Politics (OEP), generates inaccurate knowledge. OEP produces inaccurate knowledge because it studies domestic politics in isolation from international or macro processes. This methodological reductionism is often inappropriate for the phenomena IPE studies because governments inhabit a system. As a result, the political choices that OEP attempts to explain are typically a product of the interplay between domestic politics and macro processes. When OEP omits causally significant macro processes from empirical models, the models yield biased inferences about the domestic political relationships under investigation. Although we tolerated such errors when the gains from OEP were large, these errors are less tolerable now that OEP has matured. Consequently, the field should transition toward research that is non-reductionist (systemic), problem-driven, and pluralistic."

--- I don't see how the issue is _reductionism_ so much as _ignoring interactions_.

"There is currently much debate about the effectiveness of foreign aid and about what kind of projects can engender economic development. There is skepticism about the ability of econometric analysis to resolve these issues or of development agencies to learn from their own experience. In response, there is increasing use in development economics of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to accumulate credible knowl- edge of what works, without overreliance on questionable theory or statistical meth- ods. When RCTs are not possible, the proponents of these methods advocate quasi- randomization through instrumental variable (IV) techniques or natural experiments. I argue that many of these applications are unlikely to recover quantities that are use- ful for policy or understanding: two key issues are the misunderstanding of exogeneity and the handling of heterogeneity. I illustrate from the literature on aid and growth. Actual randomization faces similar problems as does quasi-randomization, notwith- standing rhetoric to the contrary. I argue that experiments have no special ability to produce more credible knowledge than other methods, and that actual experiments are frequently subject to practical problems that undermine any claims to statisti- cal or epistemic superiority. I illustrate using prominent experiments in development and elsewhere. As with IV methods, RCT-based evaluation of projects, without guid- ance from an understanding of underlying mechanisms, is unlikely to lead to scientific progress in the understanding of economic development. I welcome recent trends in development experimentation away from the evaluation of projects and toward the evaluation of theoretical mechanisms."

"Social scientists increasingly exploit natural experiments in their research. This article surveys recent applications in political science, with the goal of illustrating the inferential advantages provided by this research design. When treat- ment assignment is less than “as if” random, studies may be something less than natural experiments, and familiar threats to valid causal inference in observational settings can arise. The author proposes a continuum of plausibility for natural experiments, defined by the extent to which treatment assignment is plausibly “as if” random, and locates several leading studies along this continuum."

"The Explanation of Social Action is a sustained critique of the conventional understanding of what it means to "explain" something in the social sciences. It makes the strong argument that the traditional understanding involves asking questions that have no clear foundation and provoke an unnecessary tension between lay and expert vocabularies. Drawing on the history and philosophy of the social sciences, John Levi Martin exposes the root of the problem as an attempt to counterpose two radically different types of answers to the question of why someone did a certain thing: first person and third person responses. The tendency is epitomized by attempts to explain human action in "causal" terms. This "causality" has little to do with reality and instead involves the creation and validation of abstract statements that almost no social scientist would defend literally.
This substitution of analysts' imaginations over actors' realities results from an intellectual history wherein social scientists began to distrust the self-understanding of actors in favor of fundamentally anti-democratic epistemologies. These were rooted most defensibly in a general understanding of an epistemic hiatus in social knowledge and least defensibly in the importation of practices of truth production from the hierarchical setting of institutions for the insane. Martin, instead of assuming that there is something fundamentally arbitrary about the cognitive schemes of actors, focuses on the nature of judgment. This implies the need for a social aesthetics, an understanding of the process whereby actors intuit intersubjectively valid qualities of complex social objects. In this thought-provoking and ambitious book, John Levi Martin argues that the most promising way forward to such a science of social aesthetics will involve a rigorous field theory."

"Economists make confident assertions in op-ed columns and on cable news—so why are their explanations often at odds with equally confident assertions from other economists? And why are all economic predictions so rarely borne out? Harnessing his frustration with these contradictions, Jonathan Schlefer set out to investigate how economists arrive at their opinions.

While economists cloak their views in the aura of science, what they actually do is make assumptions about the world, use those assumptions to build imaginary economies (known as models), and from those models generate conclusions. Their models can be useful or dangerous, and it is surprisingly difficult to tell which is which. Schlefer arms us with an understanding of rival assumptions and models reaching back to Adam Smith and forward to cutting-edge theorists today. Although abstract, mathematical thinking characterizes economists’ work, Schlefer reminds us that economists are unavoidably human. They fall prey to fads and enthusiasms and subscribe to ideologies that shape their assumptions, sometimes in problematic ways.

Schlefer takes up current controversies such as income inequality and the financial crisis, for which he holds economists in large part accountable. Although theorists won international acclaim for creating models that demonstrated the inherent instability of markets, ostensibly practical economists ignored those accepted theories and instead relied on their blind faith in the invisible hand of unregulated enterprise. Schlefer explains how the politics of economics allowed them to do so. The Assumptions Economists Make renders the behavior of economists much more comprehensible, if not less irrational."

"Since World War II methods have advanced very quickly in sociology and social science, while this has not been the case with theory. In this article I suggest that one way of beginning to close the gap between the two is to focus on theorizing rather than on theory. The place where theorizing can be used in the most effective way, I suggest, is in the context of discovery. What needs to be discussed are especially ways for how to develop theory before hypotheses are formulated and tested. To be successful in this, we need to assign an independent place to theorizing and also to develop some basic rules for how to theorize. An attempt is made to formulate such rules; it is also argued that theorizing can only be successful if it is done in close unison with observation in what is called a prestudy. Theorizing has turned into a skill when it is iterative, draws on intuitive ways of thinking, and goes beyond the basic rules for theorizing."

Looks interesting, but of course the library doesn't subscribe, and sociologists apparently do not believe in PUTTING THEIR &#H!H% PAPERS ONLINE.  ETA: Thanks to reader F.B. for sending me a copy!

"Do economists accept absurd and unsupported claims about reality, and if so, why? We define four types of claims commonly made in economics that require different types of evidence, and show examples of each from the rational addiction literature. Claims about real world causal mechanisms and welfare effects seem poorly supported. A survey mailed to all researchers with peer-reviewed work on rational addiction theory provides some evidence that criteria for evaluating claims of pure theory and statistical prediction are better understood than those needed for claims of causality or welfare analysis. ... The rational addiction literature illustrates that this can lead to absurd and unjustified claims being made and accepted in even highly-ranked journals." See also http://freakynomics.blogspot.com/2011/06/flaw-in-modern-economics-and-how-to-fix.html

I wonder how hard it would be to construct a Simpson's-paradox situation, where the sign of the ATE from the between-subjects experiment was the opposite of that within each subject?

I like this.

This is a recipe for getting misled by fallacies of composition.  Imagine it's 1810 and we were considering universal schooling.  Giving a few thousand kids free access to secondary education would shuffle who gets the clerkly jobs a bit, and reduce the education premium by an indetectable amount.  Universal schooling transforms the whole occupational structure (to say nothing of politics).

"Those who use economic analysis as a tool for greater discovery instead of a circular exercises in proving the ideology of economic theory are the dangerous ideologues. How cool is that?"

"[I]if I work on a program in Euclidean space, the very definition of that space means that I accept Euclid’s axioms. Social science is not this way. We know, pace the arguments of Lionel Robbins, that our assumptions are false, though we hope that they are in some sense “good enough” to derive implications ... If axioms are only approximate, though, as in the standard Humean problem of induction, we have no way of knowing whether conclusions will also be approximate; there is no “universal continuity”. I think economists would be better served to think of axiomatization as the formalization of analogies. That is, an axiomatic deduction when axioms are imprecise may tell us nothing about the real world, but it tells us as much as a qualitative analogy, and does so in a formal way that deemphasizes the rhetorical ability of the author."

Collection of reprints of Tilly's methodological papers. Not really a weblog.

Simon and Samuelson take turns beating up (independently) on Milton Friedman's exquisitely bad and incredibly influential "Methodology of Positive Economics" essay. Large scan of a xerox out of a book, from the CMU library's online collection of Simon's personal files.

"Historical reversals highlight a basic methodological problem: is it possible to treat two successive periods both as independent cases to compare for causal analysis and as parts of a single historical sequence? I argue that one strategy for doing so, using models of path dependency, imposes serious limits on explanation. An alternative model which treats successive periods as contrasting solutions for recurrent problems offers two advantages. First, it more effectively combines analytical comparisons of different periods with narratives of causal sequences spanning two or more periods. Second, it better integrates scholarly accounts of historical reversals with actors’ own narratives of the past."

BBS target article attacking the use of western (esp. American) college students as proxies for "human nature".

"Solutions to Problems Most Social Scientists Pretend They Never Have"

"The current financial crisis has brought out a fatal flaw in the foundations of the economic theories that guided economic agents and regulators: the unwarranted claim to precision and robustness. In this article I try to diagnose this flaw and discuss possible remedies. I argue that actual agents are intrinsically less sophisticated than the models assume they are, and that the various proposals to sustain the models by appealing to "as-if rationality" all fail. I next consider behavioral economics as an alternative to the standard models, claiming that while they may allow for successful retrodiction, they do not hold out much promise for prediction. I also discuss the use of statistical models, arguing that they are subject to so many traps and pitfalls that only a handful of elite practitioners can be trusted to use them well. Finally, I offer some speculations to explain the persistence in the economic profession and elsewhere of these useless or harmful models."

Review of Hendry's _Econometrics: Alchemy or Science?_

I feel like this can be endorsed pretty wholeheartedly (though these criticisms do not apply with full force to the "saltwater" school, that's been pretty absent in shaping policy, especially as regards to finance).

Far, far too generous. (For instance, _Essays in Positive Economics_ is appalling _as methodology_, never mind anything else.)

"Kitchen sink regressions considered harmful". (I paraphrase.)

note in passing: _none_ of his 3 ways of organizing R&D matches the (uniquely successful) system of modern American science.

Aaronsw on Elster's latest book, an unread copy of which glares at me from the shelf as I type.

The locus classicus.

Yes. (Ignore the reflexive Bayesianism of economists.) "the scientific method is so utterly alien to Gerson that he doesn't seem to understand that a position that was not anti-science 7 years ago might be anti science now. The body of scientific knowledge"

RIP one of the great social scientists of our time.