Is contamination with non-empiricism one of the dangers of studying economics? I ask because I tried to read J. K. Galbraith’s The Affluent society. The first chapter is convincing on the point that things have changed and we face new problems. He also says that new problems require new solutions.
If he meant new in the sense of freshly computed that would be OK. Instead he went out of his way to emphasise that he meant new in the sense of different.The new solutions would necessarily be different from the old solutions. He fired off some pretty rhetorical fireworks to promote his claim, but I still found it bizarre.
If the later chapters, working through economics problems afresh, indicate a different solution from the ones favoured when he wrote the book, then he has made his point. If later chapters are unpersuasive, chapter one will not serve in their place. The anti-empiricism of knowing that certain answers are wrong, without going where the evidence points and seeing what is there put me of reading any more of the book.
Is contamination with non-empiricism one of the dangers of studying economics? I ask because I tried to read J. K. Galbraith’s The Affluent society. The first chapter is convincing on the point that things have changed and we face new problems. He also says that new problems require new solutions.
If he meant new in the sense of freshly computed that would be OK. Instead he went out of his way to emphasise that he meant new in the sense of different.The new solutions would necessarily be different from the old solutions. He fired off some pretty rhetorical fireworks to promote his claim, but I still found it bizarre.
If the later chapters, working through economics problems afresh, indicate a different solution from the ones favoured when he wrote the book, then he has made his point. If later chapters are unpersuasive, chapter one will not serve in their place. The anti-empiricism of knowing that certain answers are wrong, without going where the evidence points and seeing what is there put me of reading any more of the book.