Gimpei's first angry comment!

by Gimpei | 18:22 in |

I have my first irate comment. This is a good start, the sparing use of caps is a nice touch, as is the confusing grammar (what does "their" refer to in the second paragraph?). However, it would be nice if there was a bit more swearing and such. Could I suggest this as a template?

Anyway, onto the comment:

You're all over the place, Gimpei! You just repeated all the points i was making with my comment, and then claiming them as your own, at length.

The fact that your vaunted lab experiments FALSIFY their assumptions suggests they are FALSIFIABLE, no? So just say that their assumptions have been shown to be wrong. Otherwise you're like the Derridean who uses ersatz logical reasoning to proudly prove that there can be no such thing as logical reasoning.
There's seems to be some confusion here. My argument was that assumptions about consumer behavior have been disproved, and yet the majority of macroeconomists have ignored this result and continue to use these assumptions as if nothing had happened. This suggests that these assumptions are insulated from empirical testing, i.e. they are not falsifiable.

For a science to be falsifiable in the Popperian sense, the scientists who are actually using these assumptions need to accept that they can be disproved, and need to agree on the manner in which they can be disproved. There doesn't seem to be a way to disprove neoclassical assumptions in economics, thus by Popper's criteria, economics is a pseudoscience. Is this clear?

This is my interpretation of Popper, not my own opinion. I'm a big fan of Daniel Hausman and highly recommend his book The Inexact and Separate Science of Economics.

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