>Again unfair, unless you'd agree that turn about is fair play on this one.
>(In general -- that wasn't meant as a personal remark)
Agreed, especially in the light of your right-on-the-target conjecture how the gems of economic prose in question were likely to be concocted. I see plenty of that in my own discipline (sociology): "i have a publishing connection, you have a dataset a few people know about, so let's turn it into a cv-able product." The more obscure the dataset and the more idiosyncratic the methodology - the better, because that greatly reduces the chances of product's quality control by the reader. Another trick is to use sexy methods developed for crappy ... err, categorical data (such as logistic regression) whose results are sample-specific and cannot be easily compared with results obtained from a different sample. That is pomo multi-culti relativistic tripe at its worst - every text can be evaluated only within its own idiosycratic frame of reference, no general rules of verification exist, so i'm ok, you're ok, and we are all happy campers selling our intellectual commodity without even most rudimentary quality control.
btw, i wonder to what extent that process is common in natural / bio-tech sciences. One would think that strict requirements of emprical corroboration would substantially cut the volume of bs - but competition for resources is fiercer than in social sciences (since more is at stake) and that tends to increase the volume of pseudo-science. any hints?
ps. my case against a behavioral model based on utility maximization is not its purpoted simplicity and unrealism (all models are by definition highly simplistic and abstracted from empirical details) but the absence of its scope conditions. in other words, a real-life person may be maximizing, as the model claims, or may follow some other decision rules - but the model does not tell us when she does one or the other. That renders the model quite useless, because it does not allow making any predictions other than tautologies. In the same vein, the platitude that we will all die, while generally true, is of little use in making predictions about specific persons under specific circumstances. Scope conditions are what separates empirical science from metaphysics or religion.
wojtek