ABSTRACT
In Chapter 7, we learned to see the economist as a theoretician who prefers to steer well clear of empirical research. This does not make his work inconsequential. Although Paul Samuelson made much of the ‘operationalism’ of Percy Bridgman (who stated that entities can be defined only through the operations by which they are measured), he carefully cultivated the image of the brilliant mathematical theoretician who sent his thought experiments out into the world from the cafés of the MIT campus. Samuelson may have been a very different kind of economist from Friedman, but there was one thing they agreed on: economics was not an experimental science. It was mathematical, but the controlled experiment – since the nineteenth century more or less the litmus test that determined whether or not a given discipline was a science – was not something it could engage in.
