ABSTRACT
The recent economic crisis has revealed the need to critically assess the scientific status of economics. This chapter will contribute to this issue by identifying some key methodological problems that hinder the development of the discipline. These problems cannot be easily settled, but can and should be spelled out for the sake of reorientation of economic research. The methodological problems I identify are the following: (i) the dilemma between a data-driven and a theory-driven approach to causal inference; (ii) the tension, found in the attempts of explaining economic phenomena through models, between searching for relevance by abstraction and idealisation and searching for verification and truth; (iii) the difficulty of falsification; and (iv) the tension between the view of economics as moral vs. scientific discipline. While in this chapter my focus will be mainly on the first problem, I will show how it is intertwined with the other three problems.
