Endogenizing the limits of ideas: a ‘how-to’ guide to understanding ignorance and failure in ideational political economy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This commentary essay makes the case for a different way of conceptualizing the role of ideas in political economy by arguing for the need to endogenize the limits of ideas—recognizing the key roles played by ignorance and failure in economic policymaking. The central role played by the limits of ideas poses a challenge for much ideational political economy scholarship, which has not yet adequately recognized their place. This challenge is particularly acute for classical ideational political economy—the scholarship most directly descended from Peter Hall’s (Citation1993) work on policy paradigms and social learning. Yet the recent ‘practice turn’ in political economic scholarship also has its own blind spots regarding the limits of ideas, in large measure because it continues to assume that failure and ignorance are temporary problems that are generally resolved through social learning. Instead, I show that ignorance and failure are not only widespread and often persistent, but that they can also be functional to economic policymaking: a feature rather than a bug in political economic theory and practice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.020 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.083 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.028 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.019 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".