[On May 18, the website of the Ludwig von Mises Institute ran a slightly edited version of this article. You can find it here.]
In its current usage, the phrase “dismal science” is a disparagement leveled against mainstream economics for its failure to provide a coherent account of economic activity.
According to Austrian school critics of the neo-Keynesian synthesis, this failure is in large part due to a foolish determination to bring into economics the mathematical precision of the physical sciences. To achieve this precision, neo-classical economists disproportionately focus their inquiry on global measures of economic activity: gross national product, aggregate demand, global supplies of money, goods, or labor, and other variables that lend themselves to quantification and numerical modeling. Lost in mainstream economic analysis is the attention due to the individual economic actor who, by virtue of his or her power of self-determination, is ill-suited for the equation or the graph.
A similar love affair with quantitative methods has rapidly taken over the medical field over the last several decades.Continue reading “Population medicine: The other “dismal science””