Still Annoying, Fifty Years Later

By -
The late, great Fritz Machlup wrote an essay on how annoying he found it to see the word 'methodology' (the study of methods) used when what was meant was the simpler, less pretentious 'method' (how something was done). I just ran across an article on the price of General Tso's chicken in Brooklyn where the author talks about the 'methodology' of his survey -- of Chinese restaurant prices!

Comments

  1. Mario Rizzo12:50 PM

    Gene,

    I think about this literally two or three times a WEEK! I can't get Machlup's complaint out of my mind. The distinction between method and methodology is constantly ignored. Courses are given in methodology when then are really courses in methods. However, this is to be expected to some extent because most people don't understand methodology and its methods.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Bob Murphy3:24 PM

    I think about Chinese food two or three times as week, as well.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Woody7:51 PM

    I don't think about Chinese food very often. In fact, I've never tasted General Tso's chicken, though I know a stoner who used it as an excuse in a traffic stop.

    The Darien CT police pulled this person over for driving too slowly. The cop asked the stoner why his eyes were so red. The driver replied, "they put too much pepper in the General Tso's chicken, and I've been rubbing my eyes the whole way home."

    It was an effective method for avoiding a DUI charge.

    ReplyDelete
  4. James Rothfeld11:02 AM

    Where are links to

    a) Machlup's essay
    b) the article with the study.

    I'm serious. Stop being such a tease.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

In ancapistan, if you have no property, you have no rights

By -
Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
Read more

St. Paul and I Agree...

By -
Taxation is not theft: "Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves." -- Romans 13 The key idea implicit here, and the one that turned me on the subject of whether or not taxation is theft, is that "every soul" owes obedience to the "governing authorities." Now, if that is a debt I truly owe , then, when those authorities levy the taxes they need to do the job of governing, I owe them those taxes, and attempts to collect them certainly do not constitute acts of theft. And obviously it doesn't matter at all, from this point of view, whether or not I "signed" any sort of "social contract." (In fact, the history of political thought since the Reformation can be read as an attempt to find a secular rep...
Read more

Libertarianism and Violence, II

By -
I decided to move some discussion from this post up to the top level here. Specifically, Watoosh wrote: "Well, if violence is defined as initiation of force (which, of course, presupposes certain property rights), then I think Rockwell is correct..." Well, if we define cats as elephants, then many people keep elephants in their house. More seriously, firstly, violence is not usually defined that way. It's defined as, you know, violence, so that, say, someone may respond violently or non-violently to someone who aggresses against them. Otherwise, it would make no sense to say, for instance, "He punched me, but I did not stoop to violence in response." And, secondly, the libertarian usage of "initiation of force" is very offbeat. If I wander onto someone's meadow, most people would not say I had "initiated force" -- I mean, sure, I used "force" against the earth to push off walking, but that's not force directed against...
Read more