Abstract

This article highlights the potential of stylized facts to take on a non-evolutionary and non-benign character. Two stylized facts are used as primary examples throughout the article: the inverse trade-off between changes in unemployment and changes in price level (i.e., the Phillips curve) and that countries with debt-to-GDP ratios in excess of 90 percent experience lower economic growth. The insights of Pierre Bourdieu will be drawn upon to understand the socialization processes which create common sense understandings of our world that are non-evolutionary and non-benign, what Bourdieu calls doxic understandings. Doxic understandings of the world are inherently ceremonial and antithetical to an evolutionary approach. To overcome these problems, does not mean the elimination of heuristics; but rather, a continual application of reflexivity. Reflexivity is a process, where the researcher is continually interrogating what is being taken for granted in their own methods and logic, to ensure these are grounded in instrumental reasoning. Reflexivity is necessary to safeguard economics and the public against doxic understandings, and is a necessary condition of realism in analysis.

摘要

本文强调了程式化事实具有非进化性和非良性特征的潜力。整篇文章使用了两个典型的事实作为主要例子：失业率变化和价格水平变化之间的反向权衡（即菲利普斯曲线）以及债务与 GDP 比率超过 90% 的国家经历的较低经济增长。皮埃尔·布迪厄的见解将被用来理解社会化过程，这些过程创造了对我们世界的非进化和非良性的常识性理解，布迪厄称之为doxic理解。对世界的正确理解本质上是仪式性的，与进化方法背道而驰。克服这些问题，并不意味着消除启发式；而是不断应用反身性。反思性是一个过程，研究人员不断地询问他们自己的方法和逻辑中被认为理所当然的东西，以确保这些都以工具推理为基础。反身性对于保护经济学和公众免于意识形态的理解是必要的，并且是分析中现实主义的必要条件。