ABSTRACT
In 1984 I was asked by the editors of the New Palgrave Dictionary to contribute two entries-one on ‘methodology’ and the other on ‘stylized facts’—and I agreed to do so. While my entry on methodology was immediately accepted, the one on stylized facts had its own mysterious saga. When I agreed to write an entry on stylized facts, I asked the editors whether they wanted me to write on stylized facts as they are discussed by Nicholas Kaldor [1963] and Robert Solow [1970] or more generally as they are discussed today. I was told that they meant stylized facts in general and not the particular examples referred to by Kaldor and Solow. So, I wrote an entry on stylized facts as they are generally understood today. They did not like my entry at all. They said that I had ‘emasculated’ Kaldor’s idea. So I wrote a second version of the entry. They said that this version extended Kaldor’s idea so far as to empty it of whatever little meaning it originally had. Now, what did they say about whether I should write about how it is used today rather than how Kaldor discussed stylized facts? Well, I wrote a third version which was deemed to be ‘admirable’ and thus accepted and published [see Boland 1987b]. The editors did me a favor by forcing me to write this third version even if it was exclusively about Kaldor’s idea. Actually, Kaldor’s idea is very interesting. Kaldor’s objective was to find a set of agreed-upon facts (i.e. stylized facts) which both neoclassical economists and
advocates of his Keynesian-classical model would attempt to explain. Kaldor identified six so-called stylized facts. His methodological purpose was entirely polemical and, in the context of my critical approach to methodology displayed in this book, most admirable. But, except for the brief quotation above, little of his idea is understood today; and unfortunately, as a consequence of this misdirected saga, I never got to comment on the use of stylized facts by mainstream economists. In the next section I will present the essence of the first two versions of my entry, which addressed the use of stylized facts in the mainstream.
