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Writers on economic methodology may be likened to Pirandello's eponymous 'Six Characters in Search of an Author'; what economic methodologists seek, though, is not an author but an audience. As the area of economic methodology has developed over the last 30 years or so into a sub-discipline of economics (with its own JEL classification), it has created an audience of those for whom, as Marcel Boumans and John Davis describe them, 'economic methodology is an end in itself' (p. 5). Creating a philosophical discourse which takes place between economic methodologists who see their pursuits as an end in itself, however, bespeaks a modest goal which most methodologists, I suspect, wish to transcend; for methodologists are in search of an audience of practising economists in the hope that the latter will produce 'better economics' (ibid.). By directing their book to undergraduate students, Boumans and Davis hope that economists of the future, by familiarizing themselves with economic methodology, will do a better job than those of the current generation. I return to the matter of audience in closing this review but first ask how apt Boumans and Davis's book is for engaging undergraduate economists.
The book's strongest (and longest) chapter is its second - 'Methodologies of positive economics' - which looks at methodological debates in economics before 'economic methodology' existed as a sub-discipline. The chapter examines debates amongst practising economists between the 1930s and 1960s, the outcomes of which still influence the way economics is done; these are not debates amongst 'methodologists' who see their pursuit as an 'end in itself' but controversies amongst economists about the future course of their discipline. Much of the chapter is dedicated to the emergence of econometrics in the 1930s, and Boumans and Davis deploy their knowledge of the history of economic thought adeptly in their account. The exchange between Tinbergen and Keynes is reviewed (33-35), and the latter's concerns about Tinbergen's statistical methods for analysing business cycles are lucidly presented. The reader is then taken through Haavelmo's 'probability approach' (36-38) and, subsequently, to the exchange between Koopmans and Vining on the role (or need) of 'theory' in econometric work (38-41). The pinnacle of chapter two is the discussion of Friedman which starts...