Stories vs Intuition
I think economists often confuse intuition with story telling.
Intuition is the relationship between a theory and reality.
A story is a way to explain this relationship to an audience.
In my view the first part is what makes Economics a science and the second part is what makes it easier for laymen to understand.
If you are evaluating research in an area you are not contributing to, you take the story for an indicator of intuition. This kind of validity test has both type I and type II errors.
I. Using this test you would conclude that a theory lacks intuition when in fact its author lacks marketing skills. That prevents the theory from wide acceptance but eventually someone will figure out how to sell it right.
II. You could also confuse marketing skills for intuition. That is when a cute story appears to be bullshit once you check the math.
For some reason type II errors dominate in Economics.
So much so that some people even say that math is not useful and should be thrown away :)
I guess, some people just can't do the math.
Intuition is the relationship between a theory and reality.
A story is a way to explain this relationship to an audience.
In my view the first part is what makes Economics a science and the second part is what makes it easier for laymen to understand.
If you are evaluating research in an area you are not contributing to, you take the story for an indicator of intuition. This kind of validity test has both type I and type II errors.
I. Using this test you would conclude that a theory lacks intuition when in fact its author lacks marketing skills. That prevents the theory from wide acceptance but eventually someone will figure out how to sell it right.
II. You could also confuse marketing skills for intuition. That is when a cute story appears to be bullshit once you check the math.
For some reason type II errors dominate in Economics.
So much so that some people even say that math is not useful and should be thrown away :)
I guess, some people just can't do the math.