Mark D. White

Writer, editor, teacher

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about

I’m a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the College of Staten Island/CUNY, where I teach courses in philosophy, economics, and law, and the author/editor/co-editor of several books.

Category: Methodology

  • “Is Economics a Science?” Why I Couldn’t Care Less

    Mark D. White There’s been a lot of discussion of late regarding economics’ claim to be a science; Harvard economist Raj Chetty recently answered this question in the affirmative in The New York Times in response to mutterings about Robert Schiller and Eugene Fama sharing the 2014 Nobel Prize (with Lars Peter Hansen) despite having…

  • The Illusion of Mathyness

    Mark D. White Kevin Drum at Mother Jones recently highlighted a new paper by Kimmo Eriksson (Mälardalen University and Stockholm University) published in Judgment and Decision Making titled "The Nonsense Math Effect" (7/6, November 2012). Here's the abstract: Mathematics is a fundamental tool of research. Although potentially applicable in every discipline, the amount of training…

  • Which is “harder”: social science or physical science?

    Mark D. White Yesterday, Kevin Drum at Mother Jones spoke up for social science following an editorial in Nature arguing against the NSF's proposed defunding of research in political science. Here's a bit of the op-ed: Part of the blame must lie with the practice of labelling the social sciences as soft, which too readily translates as…

  • Positive signs regarding “The Future of Economics” from Davos

    Mark D. White As pointed out by Lynne Kiesling at Knowledge Problem, Nobel laureates Peter Diamond and Joe Stiglitz, along with (this year's ASE/ASSA keynote speaker) Robert Shiller and Brian Arthur, discussed "The Future of Economics," which moderator Martin Wolf summarizes at the Financial Times' The World blog. Kiesling condenses Wolf's summary (as reproduced below): First,…

  • Another pointed critique of mathematical modeling in finance and economics

    Mark D. White In today's Wall Street Journal, there is a book review by Burton Malkiel of Models. Behaving. Badly., a critique of excessive reliance of mathematical modeling in finance and economics, written by Emanuel Derman, a key player in developing the very techniques he now criticizes. Judging from Malkiel's review, Derman's book echoes themes which…

  • Does the financial crisis call for reflection on economic methodology?

    Mark D. White A minisymposium in the most recent issue of Journal of Economic Metholodogy (December 2010) asks that very question–it seems to be that reflection on methodology is always justified, and it is unfortunate that it took a crisis of this magnitude to spur it. After a brief introduction from Kevin Hoover, the following…

  • Questioning Economic Forecasting (Finally)

    Mark D. White There's a fantastic article in The Wall Street Journal today by Mark Whitehouse (!) explaining how, given the current crisis, more economists are finally starting to doubt the efficacy of mathematical modeling to predict movements in the economy. Of course, some want to build even bigger models, but others, such as Roman Frydman and…