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Dealing with Popper in Economic Methodology

In the late 1930s there began a full-court press to convince economists that they needed to do their economic analysis using mathematics. But the proponents were facing a problem: many reluctant converts were countering with the methodological claim that mathematics was nothing but tautologies. Tautologies and “analytical truths,” they said, were a typical fascination of economic cranks and quacks. At about the same time Paul Samuelson and Terence Hutchison advocated a methodological rule to avoid tautologies that would solve their problem. The rule was that every economic theorem or hypothesis must be empirically falsifiable. Samuelson’s 1941 Ph.D. thesis actually began with the methodological rule that economists should seek “operationally meaningful theorems” but subsequently defines this type of theorem as “simply a hypothesis about empirical data which could conceivably be refuted.” He went on to say that a “meaningful theorem may be false.” And above all, his Ph.D. thesis (Samuelson 1965) clearly demonstrated that “meaningful theorems” could be derived from his mathematical analysis of standard economic theory. For Hutchison (1938), the issue was whether economic statements are intendedly scientific and thus he advocated the methodological rule that they must be capable of being