ABSTRACT
Ever since Adam Smith, there has been significant disagreement about how economics should be practiced as a science. More than a century later, C. S. Peirce and his one-time classroom student Thorstein Veblen had sharply contrasting conceptions of the future of economic science around 1900 and the ideas of both can be extended to research misconduct. Veblen argued against economics becoming much more mathematical, pointing to the evolutionary anthropology of his own time as a discipline which economics should emulate rather than physics. Veblen’s key criticism was that mathematically inclined economists who would make economics much more like physics were much too mechanically minded preventing the discipline from dealing with the qualitative evolutionary change experienced by individuals and also encountered with institutions.
