Your second suggestion reminds me of an earlier period of my life. When I was in grad school, I studied some real analysis. A typical student reads Rudin's book, in all its abstract majesty, but I couldn't get through it. Luckily, I was self-studying and was able to pick up a different book instead. I ended up choosing a rigorous text that went through real analysis but from a historically-inflected perspective. It helped a lot! Much of the theoretical apparatus in real analysis is very unfamiliar, and I found it very valuable to understand the particular disputes that led to the development of basic features of modern real analysis (eg, the critiques of infinitesimals and how these led to various attempts to rigorously define the idea of a limit that ultimately led to the modern Cauchy-Weierstrauss definition, etc.). I suspect many more students would benefit from taking this approach.
This is very good indeed. As it happens, you've also narrated whole decades of my intellectual life. Thank you, and more in due course, I hope. For now, I would say that economics, like most of the academy, is more sensitive to the dynamics of the academy than to its objects of study. So Knight/uncertainty, for example, did not go very far because there is not much an aspiring young academic can do with it. On the other hand, the models that you mention, even if mutually incompatible and irresolvable, allow the aspiring young scholar to deliver something. And that counts. "Incentives" the economists call it, but I think it's impolite to turn that language on one's "scientific" peers. Keep up the good work!
Approaching economics in the same way would require reconstituting the history of economics. Why a particular branch developed, why it continued, why another failed. It would mean creating a narrative of its progress which, as you note exists, in physics. The problem here is that in physics the success of one approach to another is measured in some sense by greater explanation which is itself demonstrated by prediction or physical demonstration. Economics can't do this. if they could, we would have heard about it. The success of one approach compared to another is far more easily explained by political factors which is a discussion I doubt economists really want to have.
Good post!
Your second suggestion reminds me of an earlier period of my life. When I was in grad school, I studied some real analysis. A typical student reads Rudin's book, in all its abstract majesty, but I couldn't get through it. Luckily, I was self-studying and was able to pick up a different book instead. I ended up choosing a rigorous text that went through real analysis but from a historically-inflected perspective. It helped a lot! Much of the theoretical apparatus in real analysis is very unfamiliar, and I found it very valuable to understand the particular disputes that led to the development of basic features of modern real analysis (eg, the critiques of infinitesimals and how these led to various attempts to rigorously define the idea of a limit that ultimately led to the modern Cauchy-Weierstrauss definition, etc.). I suspect many more students would benefit from taking this approach.
This is very good indeed. As it happens, you've also narrated whole decades of my intellectual life. Thank you, and more in due course, I hope. For now, I would say that economics, like most of the academy, is more sensitive to the dynamics of the academy than to its objects of study. So Knight/uncertainty, for example, did not go very far because there is not much an aspiring young academic can do with it. On the other hand, the models that you mention, even if mutually incompatible and irresolvable, allow the aspiring young scholar to deliver something. And that counts. "Incentives" the economists call it, but I think it's impolite to turn that language on one's "scientific" peers. Keep up the good work!
Approaching economics in the same way would require reconstituting the history of economics. Why a particular branch developed, why it continued, why another failed. It would mean creating a narrative of its progress which, as you note exists, in physics. The problem here is that in physics the success of one approach to another is measured in some sense by greater explanation which is itself demonstrated by prediction or physical demonstration. Economics can't do this. if they could, we would have heard about it. The success of one approach compared to another is far more easily explained by political factors which is a discussion I doubt economists really want to have.