Neoclassical empirical evidence on employment and production laws as artefact
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Students that are taught neoclassical economics are often struck by the lack of realism of many assumptions that underlie the theory. They are usually quite relieved when they discover that there are other schools of thought in economics that entertain different, more realistic, assumptions. However the enthusiasm of students for these alternative economics paradigms is often moderated by the enormous amount of empirical evidence that seems to provide support for neoclassical theory. If neoclassical economics is wrong, they ask, why is it that so many empirical studies appear to “confirm” the main predictions of neoclassical theory? Heterodox economists often claim that neoclassical production functions and their substitution effects make little sense in our world of fixed coefficients and income effects. Claims to that effect also arose from the Cambridge capital controversies that rocked academia in the 1960s and 1970s. Neoclassical economists, however, have responded by pointing to the large number of empirical studies that seem to “verify” neoclassical theory, in particular when fitting Cobb-Douglas production functions. The purpose of this paper is to resolve this apparent paradox, and show that the “good fits” of neoclassical number crunchers is no evidence at all. Students can embrace heterodox microeconomics and its alternative assumptions without remorse. The numerous studies of empirical “evidence” supporting neoclassical production functions or other derived constructs are worthless. This empirical evidence is nothing but spurious findings, or as the title of the paper suggests, this empirical evidence is nothing but an artefact. The word artefact carries several definitions. The most common definition, relevant to science, says that an artefact, or artifact, is a spurious finding caused by faulty procedures. It is a finding that does not really exist but that was created inadvertently by the researcher. In particular we shall see that neoclassical economists claim to measure output elasticities with respect to capital and labour, whereas in reality they are estimating the profit and wage
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.008 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it