Chris Blattman just posted on a piece written by Barry Eichengreen in The National Interest on the inevitable shift of deduction-driven economics--long dominated by the intellectual theorists at their ivory-tower blackboards--to induction-driven economics firmly rooted in real-world observation.
Though Eichengreen is speaking specifically to the current financial mess, I agree with Blattman's point that he could easily be referring to development economics, a subfield that is now (thankfully) reinventing itself not just with better academic direction and collaboration but, more importantly, with a new mindset that emphasizes fieldwork and gathering data creatively. It is upsetting that Blattman reports journals still asking papers to be written in a deductive style, but it will only be a matter of time before field researchers and experimenters sweating it out in rural Africa, South Asia and Latin America start rewriting those theory books. Now if only we could get my fedora to double as a safari hat we'd have the best of both worlds.
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