Is Macroeconomics Nomothetic or Idiographic?
laws vs. narratives
While reading Good Reasons for Bad Feelings, by psychiatrist Randolph M. Nesse, I came across a useful distinction between two types of explanation.
Citing a speech given in 1894 by philosopher Wilhelm Windelband, Nesse wrote,
Explanations based on general laws that are always true he called nomothetic (nomos refers to laws, thetic to a thesis). Explanations based on historical sequences that occur only once he called idiographic (idio refers to individual unique events, graphic to description). You can call them generalizations and narratives if you like, but nomothetic and idiographic are wonderful technical terms.
In psychiatry, one can try to explain depression, say, by doing statistical analysis comparing people with and without depression. You could look at age, gender, socioeconomic status, marital status, family upbringing, and so on. One could do genome-wide association studies to try to come up with a polygenic score to predict the likelihood of depression. These efforts at explanation would be nomothetic.
Alternatively, a psychiatrist can interview an individual patient to get that person’s description of his or her depressed feelings and possible events or desires that triggered those feelings. This effort at explanation would be idiographic.
Now, use this scheme to describe macroeconomics. Mainstream macroeconomics is nomothetic to a fault. Macroeconomic models, in textbooks and journals, are entirely ahistorical. They consist of sets of equations that can be dropped into any situation to account for unemployment, inflation, and so on.
Instead, my view of macro is idiographic. Macroeconomic events are like wars or revolutions. To understand them, you have to look at the specific path that the economy took to arrive at its level of unemployment, inflation, and so on.
Re: "In psychiatry, one can try to explain depression, say, by doing statistical analysis comparing people with and without depression. [... .] These efforts at explanation would be nomothetic."
This method would produce *empirical generalizations* about depression.
If one wishes to provide *causal explanations* of depression, I would distinguish two methods (and perhaps there are others):
(a) Identify *mechanisms* (ways in which things can happen). This is an abstract causal explanation.
Mechanisms aren't laws. Mechanisms are contingent. We scarcely know what contingencies are necessary and/or sufficient to trigger mechanisms in psychology.
(b) Identify a sequence of facts, events, mechanisms, and actions, each of which substantially increased the probability that the person would experience depression. This is a narrative causal explanation.
Where liberalism (maybe leftism is a better term for what I refer to) seems to most often go wrong, including wokeism, is when it is idiographic without being adequately informed by nomothetic knowledge and understanding. I think the same applies to psychiatry and macroeconomics.