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Some Legacies of Robbins' An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science

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  • RICHARD G. LIPSEY

Abstract

This paper criticizes three Robbinsian positions still often found in modern economics: (1) the methodology of intuitively obvious assumptions; (2) treating facts as illustrations rather than as tests of theoretical propositions; (3) assuming that theory provides universally applicable generalizations independent of the characteristics of individual economies and so are independent of specific historical processes. Two corollaries of point (3) are that theory cannot assist in explaining unique historical events such as the emergence of sustained growth in the West and that economists need not interest themselves in the details of the technologies that produce the nation's wealth.

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  • Richard G. Lipsey, 2009. "Some Legacies of Robbins' An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 76(s1), pages 845-856, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:econom:v:76:y:2009:i:s1:p:845-856
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0335.2009.00792.x
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Tobin, James, 1981. "The Monetarist Counter-Revolution Today-An Appraisal," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 91(361), pages 29-42, March.
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    3. Ruttan, Vernon W., 2006. "Is War Necessary for Economic Growth?: Military Procurement and Technology Development," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780195188042.
    4. Lipsey, Richard G. & Carlaw, Kenneth I. & Bekar, Clifford T., 2005. "Economic Transformations: General Purpose Technologies and Long-Term Economic Growth," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199290895.
    5. Robert Goldfarb & Jonathan Ratner, 2009. "Exploring different visions of the model-empirics nexus: Solow versus Lipsey," Journal of Economic Methodology, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 16(2), pages 159-174.
    6. Dani Rodrik, 2006. "Goodbye Washington Consensus, Hello Washington Confusion? A Review of the World Bank's Economic Growth in the 1990s: Learning from a Decade of Reform," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 44(4), pages 973-987, December.
    7. Richard Lipsey, 2001. "Successes and failures in the transformation of economics," Journal of Economic Methodology, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 8(2), pages 169-201.
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    Cited by:

    1. Thiago Dumont Oliveira & Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak, 2016. "Lionel Robbins’ first-step individualism and the prehistory of microfoundations," Textos para Discussão Cedeplar-UFMG 537, Cedeplar, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.
    2. Richard G. Lipsey, 2016. "A RECONSIDERATION OF THE THEORY OF NON-LINEAR SCALE EFFECTS: Causes and Consequences of Varying Returns to, and Economies of, Scale," Discussion Papers dp16-04, Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University.

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