Who Were the Sea Peoples?

"The full and intimate quantification of any science is a consummation devoutly to be wished. Nevertheless, it is not a consummation that can be effectively sought by measuring." -- Thomas Kuhn, "The Function of Measurement in Modern Physical Science" What Kuhn is getting at here is that the ability to make meaningful measurements is the end product of the quantification of a science, and not the road to its quantification. Social scientists would do well to remember this point, especially when they try things like "measuring" happiness by asking a bunch of people to rate their own happiness on a scale of 1 to 10. They have no theory of what, exactly, they are measuring, of how their "device" purports to measure it, or as to what sort of quantitative relationships they expect it to have with other measurements. Physical scientists took over a century of experimenting with thermometers to figure out what they were measuring and how it w...

Andreas Hoffman and I now have our working paper posted at PhilPapers. Here is the abstract: The paper aims to explore what it means for something to be a social cycle, for a theory to be a social cycle theory, and to offer a suggestion for a simple, yet, we believe, fundamentally grounded schema for categorizing them. We show that a broad range of cycle theories can be described within the concept of disruption and adjustments. Further, many important cycle theories are true endogenous social cycle theories in which the theory provides a reason why the cycle should recur. We find that many social cycle theories fit with a two-population disruption and adjustment model similar to the well-known predator-prey model. This implies that a general modeling framework could be established for creating agent-based models of many social cycle theories.

Sometimes you see people claiming the above as a way of dismissing the entire economics profession. Now, I am no defender of economic imperialism in the social sciences. But I also think the claim questioned in the title of this post is seriously overblown. Consider the theory of optimal currency areas developed largely in the 1960s and 1970s. According to the tenets of this theory, as interpreted by many prominent economists, the Euro was a bad idea. According to an unpublished paper that I have just read, both Paul Krugman and Milton Friedman warned against the creation of the based on this theory. Many economists, apparently, predicted just the ways in which the Eurozone would break down. The politicians ignored these warnings and went ahead based on political considerations. And the economists turned out to be correct. So, although there are many contentious areas in economics, there really is some core agreement, backed up by empirical evidence.

Except he likes the disaster : Thinking like an economist simply means that you scientifically approach human social behavior - which means that you approach them like any other species of animal. Nobody judges animals when they behave in ways that we would consider horrendous in other humans. They're just... animals. And that's what you really need for good social science. You need to look at your fellow humans as "just animals." When we had real social scientists, such as Aristotle, they knew that man is the "rational animal," and as such, distinctly different from other animals, and so in need of special analysis, such as political science. If you can't tell the difference between a dandelion and a redwood tree, you are going to make an awful botanist, and we have awful social sciences because the practitioners can't tell the difference between a human being and a tapeworm.