The progress of economic science has been seriously damaged. You can’t believe anything that comes out of [it]. Not a word. It is all nonsense, which future generations of economists are going to have to do all over again. Most of what appears in the best journals of economics is unscientific rubbish. I find this unspeakably sad. All my friends, my dear, dear friends in economics, have been wasting their time....They are vigorous, difficult, demanding activities, like hard chess problems. But they are worthless as science.
The physicist Richard Feynman called such activities Cargo Cult Science....By “cargo cult” he meant that they looked like science, had all that hard math and statistics, plenty of long words; but actual science, actual inquiry into the world, was not going on. I am afraid that my science of economics has come to the same point.
Deirdre McCloskey, em um livro que foi publicado seis anos antes da crise de 2008 e, sintomaticamente, está esgotado.
Update: há uma versão em pdf aqui.
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Já a conhecia, mas fico feliz que ela tem sido mais citada no Brasil. Recentemente, o Elio Gaspari comentou umas poucas linhas sobre o livro dela "The Bourgeois Virtues".
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