MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W2146114088 · doi:10.1108/17554171111176903

The financial crisis and the failure of modern social science

2011· article· en· W2146114088 on OpenAlex
George Bragues

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueQualitative Research in Financial Markets · 2011
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEconomics, Econometrics and Finance
TopicFinancial Markets and Investment Strategies
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Guelph-Humber
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPositivismFinancial crisisOriginalityEmpiricismEconomicsSociologyFinancePositive economicsEpistemologySocial sciencePolitical scienceQualitative researchLawMacroeconomics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Purpose The aim of this paper is to explore the lessons offered by the financial crisis about the appropriate epistemological approaches to apply in the study of human affairs in general, and of the financial markets in particular. Design/methodology/approach The paper applies a qualitative and historical approach invoking debates in the philosophy of social science to dominant themes and concepts in modern quantitative finance. It is argued that underlying the theory and practice of modern quantitative finance is a commitment to an empiricist epistemology modeled on the natural sciences. Findings In the financial crisis, modern social science, with its positivist/quantitative orientation, was put to the test in a way that it had never been before. That it failed this test is one of the chief lessons of the financial crisis. Mathematical techniques are inherently incapable of accounting for human behaviour. The crisis serves to underline that a fundamental divide exists between the natural and human realms. Practical implications While the mathematical‐positivist techniques continue to hold some promise in the study of finance, it has become obvious that this dominant approach needs be enhanced by more qualitative techniques. Originality/value The paper shows that although in popular media outlets the mathematization of finance has been singled out as a cause of the crisis, the broader implications for the analysis of human activity have not yet been probed. Nor, in the wake of the crisis, has there been a systematic, philosophically informed, critique of the positivist‐quantitative orientation buttressing academic research into the financial markets.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.024
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.005
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesScience and technology studies
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.360
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0240.005
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.002
Science and technology studies0.0010.007
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.177
GPT teacher head0.385
Teacher spread0.207 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it