Tyler Cowen: uncertainty

Transcript context

…But don’t other fields? More than other social science fields. We have microeconomics. You can put an argument into micro and all economists can grasp it, and anyone who knows some economics can make some sense of it. And we have an empirical side. The empirical results of economics, a lot of them, you can communicate in a sentence, and often to nonspecialists. So both the common framework and some empirical element, even if you’re a little skeptical about both. They’re there as a first offering, even if you end up mocking them. Sociology doesn’t have the common framework, philosophy, the empirical element is tough to find. In analytic and continental philosophy, the arguments take so long. Economic arguments, if they’re good, they don’t take that long. I might be wrong, but if an argument takes 10 pages, it’s almost certainly too complicated. Right, right. I think many of us are here so we can ask the question, “How do you read so much?” [laughter]…

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