ABSTRACT
Among post-Keynesian economists, Alfred Eichner was one of the strongest critics of orthodox economics because his criticism went beyond the realm of policy and extended to methodology. In Eichner's view, orthodox economics does not deserve to be called a science, primarily because it fails to submit its core theory pronouncements to the scrutiny of empirical testing (Eichner, 1978, 1983, 1985). Eichner correctly described orthodox economics as an outgrowth of the eighteenth-century mechanistic view of the universe that aspires to become the classical physics of the social sciences. I shall argue that in his call for economics to become a science in the modern sense, Eichner was calling for acceptance of a probabilistic social science based on statistical inference from empirical data. This, however, is somewhat at odds with the views of many post-Keynesians, and of Keynes. While these economists have valid points in insisting that a theory of real-world decision making cannot always include the assumption of ergodicity, Eichner's position is equally a challenge to post-Keynesians to demarcate more clearly the boundaries of such assumptions, and specifically to give theoretical content to the distinction between the short run and the long run.
