lige til at henvende sig mod den bredere offentlighed. Nok er en intern kommu-
nikation mellem fagfæller i f.eks. internationalt anerkendte tidsskrifter hen-
sigtsmæssig og n0dvendig, men den kan ikke stâ alene. Man mâ som videnska-
belig arbejdende 0konom ogsâ formidle sine budskaber (teoretisk, empirisk som
0konomisk politisk) til offentligheden.
Med en omskrivning af Alfred Marshall ber0mte karakteristik af hans egen ar-
bejdsmetode,15 opfordrer Krugman afslutningsvist til, at man som 0konom b0r
arbejde pâ f0lgende mâde: (1) Figure out what you think about an issue, wor-
king back and forth among verbal intuition, evidence, and as much as you need.
(2) Stay with it till you have done. (3) Publish the intuition, the math, and the
evidence - all three - in an economic journal. (4) But also try to find a way of
expressing the idea without the formal apparatus. (5) If you can, publish that
where it can do the world some good.
5. Opsamling
Mâske har Krugman ret i sin karakteristik af, hvordan moderne 0konomisk
forskning drives. Men selvom matematisk formalisme i mange tilfælde kan
bruges til at g0re teoretiske landvindinger, sâ er en uniform metodologi ikke
hensigtsmæssig ved en belysning af alle 0konomiske problemstillinger, jf.
Chick (1998). Som pâpeget af Chick & Dow (2001), er det en for snæver be-
tragtning at fortolke det 0konomiske system som et lukket og uforanderligt sy-
that most economists do not do first-rate research, and that there is a lot of irrelevant mathe-
matical modelling out there. But in what academic field do most people do first-rate research?
And if someone is doing work that will not be read or cited, does it matter whether it is boring
literary work (as in many humanities), boring experimental work (as in many physical sci-
ences), or boring mathematical modelling?
15 I et brev til A.L. Bowley skrev Marshall i 1906: (1) Use mathematics as a shorthand language,
rather than as an engine of inquiry. (2) Keep to them till you have done. (3) Translate into Eng-
lish. (4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life. (5) Burn the mathematics.
(6) If you can’t succeed in (4), burn (3)”. Senere i brevet skriver Marshall videre: “Mathematics
used in a Fellowship thesis by a man who is not a mathematician by nature - and I have come
across a good deal of that - seems to me an unmixed evil, her citeret fra Coase (1975:174).
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