ABSTRACT
Economic cycles and economic crises belong to the defining moments in economic history because they affect the sense of economic security and level of welfare at large. As one of many consequences of the crisis, the long-abandoned idea of “uncertainty” once again gained currency among economists. Of course, die-hard (Post-)Keynesians and other heterodox economists had never quite given up the concept of uncertainty, but this time around it became quite fashionable even among mainstream economists. Adopting uncertainty in economics inevitably leads to serious challenges for the dominant ontology and epistemology of economics. The new paradigm gives up the positivist idea of a universal truth and of objective economic laws, thus giving way for a constructivist perspective of economic rules that emerge from individual, subjective interactions. The test approach makes use of the fact that under the null of “no uncertainty”, more or less standard econometric procedures are applicable, while under the alternative of a higher-order uncertainty, they are not.
