Academic research

The useful science?

Economics is highly parochial

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The recent obsession with quantitative methods has made economic degrees almost irrelevant to development. The problem isn't just the scarcity of data. The bigger issue is the failure to catch up with the discovery that linear statistical analysis has limited application to the complex institutional issues at the core of the development process.


This article confirms the old joke about economists searching for truth under the illumination of the lamp post. Perhaps more troubling is its naive acceptance that more economic analysis will lead to better policy outcomes. This can happen, but it depends on how the market for policy advice is structured.


This is more interesting than you appear to realize. I taught courses for years (in environmental sciences rather than economics) and I emphasized that the predictions one makes are a function of an adequate broad representative database. You are saying, and showing, that the database for economic studies has been highly biased toward economies like the U.S. What do you think that implies about the ability to generalize from the results of those studies to the diverse economies of the world? Hmmm?


Well first of all newspapers are important to be up to date: Example during travelling or for work or during food pauses. It's combined with scienes for the general knowledge but always protect the USA economy.

Quintus Borgman

Colin Lewis

They certainly do and a study found that this led to significant differences being overlooked. In fact a study was carried out - “The Weirdest People in the World?” By “weird” they meant both unusual and Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Given the data, they concluded that social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population (America) from which to draw broad generalizations. A good review of the study can be found here -


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