Professor Nelson Quoted by BusinessWeek

Professor of Economics and Department Chair Julie Nelson was recently asked by BusinessWeek to comment on the proposed launch of a new journal titled Man and the Economy by Ronald Coase, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago and 1991 Nobel Laureate, and Ning Wang, assistant professor at the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University.  As Professor Nelson explains in the BusinessWeek story, economics has been trying to differentiate itself from other social sciences by imagining that economic laws resemble the laws of the natural sciences. This pursuit has led mainstream economics to excessive formalization, thereby divorcing it from economic reality. Coase and Wang suggest that their new journal will encourage different thinking among economists through the use of "case studies, historical comparisons and qualitative data," in an attempt to help the reversal of this trend in the development of the discipline.

You can read the BusinessWeek article here.