Marco Tulio Angulo

I have made the claim, in a series of recent posts, that science is more like a tree than a linear progression and that economics, and macroeconomics in particular, can get stuck on the wrong branch of the tree. Pascal Michaillat shared a link to a paper of his with George Akerlof which formalizes that idea. pascalmichaillat.org/10/ Here is the abstract of their paper “We develop a model describing how false paradigms may persist, hindering scientific progress. The model features two paradigms, one describing reality better than the other. Tenured scientists display homophily: they favor tenure candidates who adhere to their paradigm. As in statistics, power is the probability (absent any bias) of denying tenure to scientists adhering to the false paradigm. The model shows that because of homophily, when power is low, the false paradigm may prevail. Then only an increase in power can ignite convergence to the true paradigm. Historical case studies suggest that low power comes either from lack of empirical evidence, or from reluctance to base tenure decisions on available evidence.” All that is required to get ‘stuck’ in a false paradigm is that the gatekeepers of a science have a slight preference for ideas they agree with and that false idea are hard to falsify. @S_Surprenant @haugejostein