Money and Markets: Essays in Honor of Leland B. Yeager

6 Roger KopplLandreth and Colander (Chapter 7) identify the word to describe Yeager’s laissezfaire attitude on method: pluralism. They argue from Yeager’s pluralism to apessimistic conclusion on his methodology and economics. Yeager’s “commitmentto pluralism has played an important role in reducing his work’s influence.” Theirpessimism, however, is not complete. The pendulum, they think, is swinging in asomewhat Yeagerian direction. Landreth and Colander’s metaphorical pendulumrepresents the fashion in economic method. It swings between formalism and antiformalism.Pluralism takes hold only when neither side has preponderate strength.Thus, Yeager’s methodological pluralism is fated to be a passing fancy at best. Buthis rather inductive and non-formal style of theorizing is making a comeback forgood institutional reasons. In the past, the formalism had an institutional advantageover its rival. The formalist had lots of tidy little projects to give his or her graduatestudents and these students could get tenure off the project thus endowed.Formalism of the post-war type “created large numbers of small jobs, enough tokeep an academic neoclassical army of students busy.” Today, however, we havethe personal computer. “Today, instead of writing a general solution to an abstractproblem, it is easier to provide a solution for a specific problem.” We can programcomputers to solve problems with heterogeneous agents and institutional details.Thus, “solid inductive analysis combined with a sharp intuition and a rigor of thesort that characterized Leland Yeager’s work will be making a comeback, albeit ina quite different form.” Students and admirers of Leland Yeager should welcomethis change. They should also, however, recall the defense of “armchair theorizing”that he made in 1954. Let us not cut ourselves off from our “inside” knowledge ofhuman action.Yeager’s now classic essay comparing George and Menger exemplifies Yeager’sability to construct a close methodological argument without slipping into needlessjargon or the worship of either method or the study thereof, methodology. Anothergood example of the same phenomenon is Yeager’s classic “Methodenstreit overDemand Curves” (Yeager 1960). Addressing a literature on the meaning ofdemand, Yeager takes aim at the “methodological precepts set forth in this literature:its insistence on a particular conception of empirical falsifiability and concreteapplicability of theories and its insistence that the theories deal only with actually orconceptually attainable positions of equilibrium” (p. 53). “Methodenstreit” ends witha plea for methodological tolerance. He says, “there is no warrant for exclusive insistenceon particular methods” (p. 60). Klappholz and Agassi were right, Yeagercontinues, to say that methodological rules more specific than the general admonitionto be critical and exposed to criticism are “likely to be futile and possiblyharmful” (Klappholz and Agassi 1959: 74, as cited in Yeager 1960: 60). Here, as inmost of Yeager’s methodological writings, we sense a careful scholar disgruntled athaving been driven into the tedious muck of methodology in order to clear a pathfor our real business, namely, economics. This attitude reaches one of its highestexpressions in Yeager’s 1995 article “Tacit Preachments Are the Worst Kind.”In his contribution to his volume, Steven Caudill (Chapter 6) reveals himself tobe a Yeagerian methodologist. Caudill’s ire, his withering irony, and his straightshootingargument might be attributed to the coincidence that he was born