Skip to main content

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
Cancel
×
×
Home
  • Home
Chapter
  • Print publication year: 2008
  • Online publication date: May 2010

3 - Instituting facts and constituting rules

Export citation
Summary

Economists typically believe in models. This methodological approach can be useful for lots of purposes, but… I am not trying to construct a model; I am trying to advance a theory that states an important set of facts about how society actually works.

John R. Searle

“Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them…Stick to Facts, sir!”

Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, in Charles Dickens's Hard Times

The scientific study of social phenomena must, as we would expect with all scientific endeavors, concern itself with the explication, stipulation, and explanation of facts. To apprehend social reality, just as with physical reality, we want to concern ourselves with facts. Economists concern themselves with a plethora of facts and they have devised numerous metrics to render these facts in a measurable form. Economic concepts such as gross domestic product, the capital account deficit, the exchange rate between currencies, and the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) are all considered by economists to be measurable facts that can be assigned a quantitative value. But these facts all have something in common. They are a special form of fact that we may call an “institutional fact.” The economic realm is, as is the social realm, not predominantly concerned with material facts, but with institutional facts.

Recommend this book

Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this book to your organisation's collection.

Central Banking as Global Governance
  • Online ISBN: 9780511720567
  • Book DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511720567
Please enter your name
Please enter a valid email address
Who would you like to send this to *

CAPTCHA *

Skip to the audio challenge
×
Searle, John R., The Construction of Social Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1995), pp. 12–13
Wendt, Alexander, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 172
Dessler, David, “What is at Stake in the Agent–Structure Debate?” International Organization 43(3) (1989): 441–74
Giddens, Anthony, The Constitution of Society (Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), p. 20
Hall, Rodney Bruce, “Moral Authority as a Power Resource” International Organization 51(4) (1997): 591–622
Barnett, Michael and Finnemore, Martha, Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004)
Mayer, Martin, The Fed: The Inside Story of How the World's Most Powerful Financial Institution Drives the Markets (New York: The Free Press, 2001), p. 93
Swedberg, Richard, Max Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 44
Weber, Max, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), p. 108
Fischer, Stanley, “Modern Central Banking” in Fischer, Stanley, IMF Essays from a Time of Crisis: The International Financial System, Stabilization, and Development (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 169–222
Maxfield, Sylvia, Gatekeepers of Growth: The International Political Economy of Central Banking in Developing Countries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997)
Woodward, Bob, Maestro: Greenspan's Fed and the American Boom (New York: Touchstone, 2001), p. 39
Solomon, Steven, The Confidence Game: How Unelected Central Bankers are Governing the Changed Global Economy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 60
Soros, George, The Alchemy of Finance: Reading the Mind of the Market (New York: Wiley & Sons, 1987)
Bascom, Wilbert O., The Economics of Financial Reform in Developing Countries (New York: St. Martin's, 1994), p. 40
Freedman, Charles, “Central Bank Independence” in Mizen, Paul (ed.) Central Banking, Monetary Theory and Practice: Essays in Honour of Charles Goodhart, vol. I (Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2003), pp. 97–8.
Dickens, Charles, Our Mutual Friend (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1997)
Werner, Richard A., Princes of the Yen: Japan's Central Bankers and the Transformation of the Economy (Armonk, NY and London: M. E. Sharpe, 2003), p. 53
Woo-Cumings, Meredith, The Developmental State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999)
Amsden, Alice H., The Rise of “The Rest”: Challenges to the West from Late-Industrializing Economies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)
Wade, Robert and Veneroso, Frank, “The Asian Crisis: The High Debt Model Versus the Wall Street-Treasury-IMF Complex” New Left Review no. 228 (March/April 1998): 3–24
Cargill, Thomas F., Hutchison, Michael M., and Ito, Takatoshi, Financial Policy and Central Banking in Japan (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2000)
Hall, Rodney Bruce, “The Discursive Demolition of the Asian Development Model” International Studies Quarterly 47(1) (2003): 71–99
Bell, Stephen, “The Limits of Rational Choice: New Institutionalism in the Test Bed of Central Banking Politics in Australia” Political Studies 50 (2002): 488
Cancel
Confirm
×