The Victorian polymath William Stanley Jevons is generally and rightly venerated as one of the great innovators of economic theory and method in what came to be known as the 'marginalist revolution'. This book is an investigation into the cultural and intellectual resources that Jevons drew upon to revolutionize research methods in economics. Jevons's uniform approach to the sciences was based on a firm belief in the mechanical constitution of the universe and a firm conviction that all scientific knowledge was (...) limited and therefore hypothetical in character. Jevons's mechanical beliefs found their way into his early meteorological studies, his formal logic, and his economic pursuits. By using mechanical analogies as instruments of discovery, Jevons was able to bridge the divide between theory and statistics that had become more or less institutionalized in mid nineteenth-century Britain. (shrink)

We analyze the cognitive strategies underlying performance in the Number task, a Math game that requires both arithmetic fluency and mathematical creativity. In this game all elements in a set of numbers have to be used precisely once to create a target number with basic arithmetic operations. We argue that some instances of this game are NP complete, by showing its relation to the well-known Partition problem. We propose heuristics based on the distinction in forward and backward reasoning. The Number (...) Game is part of Math Garden, a popular online educational platform for practicing and monitoring math skills using innovations in computerized adaptive testing. These educational games generate enormous amounts of rich data on children's cognitive development. We found converging evidence for the use of forward proximity heuristics in the data of Math Garden, consisting of more than 20 million answers to 1,700 items. Item difficulties and the structure of correct answers were analyzed. (shrink)

Over time, Mark Blaug became increasingly sceptical of the merits of the approach to the history of economics that we find in his magnum opus, Economic theory in retrospect, first published in 1962, and increasingly leaned to favour 'historical' over 'rational' reconstructions. In this essay, I discuss Blaug's shifting historiographical position, and the changing terms of historiographical debate. I do so against the background of Blaug's personal life history and the increasingly beleaguered position the history of economic thought found itself (...) in after the Second World War. I argue that Blaug never resolved the tensions between historical and rational reconstructions, partly because he never fleshed out a viable notion of historical reconstruction. I trace Blaug's difficulty in doing so to his firm conviction that the history of economics should speak to economists, a conviction clearly present in his 2001 essay: "No history of ideas, please, we're economists". (shrink)

This paper examines the self-measurement and self-tracking practices of a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Genevese pastor and pedagogical innovator, François-Marc-Louis Naville, who extensively used Benjamin Franklin’s tools of moral calculation and a lesser known tool, Marc-Antoine Jullien’s moral thermometer, to set a direction to his life and to monitor and improve his moral character. My contribution sheds light on how technologies of quantification molded notions of personal responsibility and character within an emerging utilitarian context. I situate Naville’s use of these tools within his (...) work as a pastor in a parish of the Republic of Geneva and within the Genevese and Swiss pedagogical reform movement of the early nineteenth century. I provide a detailed examination of how Naville used and adapted Franklin’s and Jullien’s tools of moral accounting for his own moral and religious purposes. Time, God’s most precious gift to man, served Naville as the ultimate measure of his moral worth. (shrink)

Résumé Les questions d’échelle ont donné lieu à une large réflexion s’agissant de la modélisation et de l’expérimentation des systèmes physiques, mais elles n’ont pas été discutées dans le cadre des expériences économiques. Dans cet article, on distingue deux sortes d’expériences, les expériences « génériques » et « spécifiques ». Développant une comparaison entre deux études expérimentales en laboratoire portant sur l’« effet des prix postés », on montre que les questions d’échelle deviennent importantes dans les expériences spécifiques en raison (...) de la réduction aux dimensions du laboratoire de l’échelle de temps propre au marché cible. Cela impose des choix dans la configuration matérielle de l’expérience comme des changements de rôle pour les sujets expérimentaux. Notre discussion, donc, s’inscrit au sein de la littérature récente sur la validité externe et la matérialité des expériences. JEL Classification : B41, C90, L92, L98. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper contrasts the research strategies of two women reformers, Florence Kelley and Ellen Swallow Richards, which entailed different strategies of social reform. In the early 1890s, social activist Florence Kelley used the social survey as a weapon for legal reform of the working conditions of women and children in Chicago’s sweatshop system. Kelley’s case shows that her surveys were most effective as “grounded” knowledge, rooted in a local community with which she was well acquainted. Her social survey, re-enacted by (...) lawmakers and the press, provided the evidence that moved her target audience to legal action. Chemist and propagator of the Home Economics Movement Ellen Richards situated the social problem, and hence its solution, not in exploitative working conditions, but in the inefficient and wasteful usage of available resources by the poor. Laboratory work, she argued, would enable the development of optimal standards, and educational programs should bring these standards to the household by means of models and exhibits. With this aim, she constructed public spaces that she ran as food laboratories and sanitary experiments. Kelley and Richards thus crossed the doorsteps of the household in very different ways. While Florence Kelley entered the household to change the living and working conditions of the poor by changing the law, Richards flipped the household inside out by bringing women into hybrid public laboratory spaces to change their behavior by experiment and instruction. (shrink)