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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2012
Sir John Hicks's career in economics spans more than fifty years, in the course of which he has published fourteen books, including six collections of almost one hundred essays. In some of these, particularly Value and Capital (1939) and A Revision of Demand Theory (1956), there are hints of Hicks's general attitude to the nature of economics, but it is only recently that he has become more explicit about his views on the methodology of economics. A 1976 essay on ““Revolutions” in Economics” voiced doubts about the applicability of Lakatos's philosophy of science to economics; the opening and closing chapters of Causality in Economics (1979) threw up similar doubts about the wider question of empirical testing in economics; and, finally, an essay written in 1983 with the pointed title of “A Discipline Not a Science” decisively parted company with all varieties of empiricism, Popperianism, falsifiability, or call it what you will, in economics.
Economics as a discipline not a science
After observing that economic theories can offer no more than “weak explanations” for economic events because they are always subject to a ceteris paribus clause–a feature that he appears to believe is unique to economics–Hicks concludes:
it becomes clear that they cannot be verified (or falsified) by confrontation with fact. We have been told that “when theory and fact come into conflict, it is theory, not fact, that must give way” [a quote from R.G. Lipsey]. […]
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