I have completed a book that I've been working on for about a year and a half. But I have been researching it for about 45 years.
This book is on a topic that almost nobody wants to read about. It is a book about the epistemology of economics. Epistemology asks these two questions, but in one sentence: "What can we know, and how can we know it?" It is not a question that many economists have ever thought about. It is a topic which is not taught in any university I have read about. The course would not attract many students. It is not of any real interest to academic economists, and surely not of any real interest to investors.
Yet it is an important topic. One of the few economists who has ever given attention to it was Ludwig von Mises. He wrote a book on it over 50 years ago, Epistemological Problems of Economics. He also devoted chapters II and III of Human Action to questions of epistemology. Those two chapters have bogged down readers ever since 1949.
My book is titled The Covenantal Structure of Christian Economics.
If you think economists are not interested in epistemology, you should investigate how much interest has been shown by Christians.
All in all, there is not a big market for this book.
Yet the question of epistemology is crucial. People come to us and tell us they discovered some major truth. They want us to change our lives in terms of this truth. It is legitimate to ask the question: "How do you know what you're saying is true?"
My approach to the question is different from anything that anybody has written in the past. The questions that I deal with are dealt with implicitly, and occasionally explicitly, by academic economists. But they don't present these issues in the format that I have used. My format will be unfamiliar to economists, social scientists, and the general public. Yet, once you get a handle on them, they are relatively easy. I taught an entire year's course in the history of Western literature to sophomore high school students. I didn't get one complaint from any student about not being able to understand what I was talking about.
There are five questions that we have to get answered in order to find out what a person's philosophy is. This also applies to analyzing organizations, nations, and entire civilizations. The five questions are these:
Who's in charge here?
To whom do I report?
What are the rules?
What do I get if I obey? Disobey?
Does this outfit have a future?
I have examined economics in terms of these five questions. Inevitably, these questions have to be dealt with. But they are not dealt with in a systematic fashion, so the typical reader is unaware of how any particular economist deals with these issues.
You may download the book here.
It is not yet typeset, but several site members wanted to read it, so I am making it available now.
Let me know if you find any typographical errors. Garynorth@garynorth.com.
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