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from Part I - Introduction: Content, Structure, and Strategy of Mainstream Economics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 May 2023
Chapter 7 is concerned with the global strategy and structure of economic theory. After arguing that Thomas Kuhns and Imre Lakatos notions of paradigms and research programs are in some ways misleading and not sufficiently detailed to be immediately applicable to economics, chapter 7 sketches the structure and strategy of economics as an inexact and separate science and comments on the role of abstract general equilibrium theories in this enterprise. Crucial to the global structure of economics is the conviction that economic outcomes depend mainly on a small set of causal factors that typically capture the most important features of economic outcomes. Economic theories are inexact, because other causal factors are left out, but at a high level of approximation, they are complete, and their scope includes the whole of economic phenomena.
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