ABSTRACT
This chapter develops the two criticisms of Hausman’s Inexact and Separate Science of Economics that were sketched in Chapter 16. It suggests that though his empirical approach to economic methodology and his overall thesis are right, the book’s distance from Lakatos is in practice less than his explicit criticisms would suggest. More important than this is the criticism that Hausman has paid too much attention to economic theory, and too little to econometrics and economists’ empirical practices, the only sustained treatment of which is his discussion of experimental economics and the problem of preference reversal. The reason why this matters is that when he turns to criticism, a significant fraction of his proposals are concern the empirical side of the discipline.
