June 30
- George C. Homans (1967). The Nature of Social Science. Harbinger Book.
- One of the giants of social science discusses “discovery and explanation”, “general propositions” and the “difficulties of explanation”. He starts with: “For our purposes – my readers’ and mine – the social sciences include psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, history, and probably linguistics. These sciences are in fact a single science. They share the same subject matter – the behaviour of men. And they employ, without always admitting it, the same body of general explanatory principles. This last truth is so obvious that it is still highly controversial”.
- Kenneth Craik (1943). The Nature of Explanation. Cambridge University Press.
- Craik, was a brilliant mind who died too early. This is his only book, and one that we can enjoy as we read about the importance of explanation, relational and descriptive theories, causality and the nature of thought.
- Mary S. Morgan (2012). The World in the Model: How Economists Work and Think. Cambridge University Press.
- Morgan has written extensively on the history of economics and econometrics or statistics. According to Roger Backhouse this book offers the best analysis to date of how economists work with models.
- C. H. Waddington (1977). Tools for Thought: How to Understand and Apply the Latest Scientific Techniques of Problem Solving. Basic Books.
- As you can see, this book was written many years ago by Waddington but still very informative.
- Robert and Michèle Root-Bernstein (1999). Sparks of Genius: The 13 Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People. Mariner Books.
- A book about creative thinking, looking at elements such as observing, imaging, abstracting, analogizing, modelling, playing, synthesizing and more.
- Daniel Friedman and Shyam Sunder (1994). Experimental Method: A Primer for Economists.
- More and more economists are using experiments as a source of investigation. The book provides a good overview of what is needed to conduct experiments.
- James Robert Brown (1991). The Laboratory of the Mind: Thought Experiments in the Natural Sciences. Routledge.
- As social scientists, we are not used to thought experiments, which is more reason to take a closer look.
- Alan S. Gerber and Donald P. Green (2012). Field Experiments. Design, Analysis, and Interpretation. W. W. Norton.
- Two political science scholars provide a concise text on an important method.
- Fritz Zwicky (1957). Morphological Astronomy. Springer.
- Zwicky was an astronomer, and a household name at Caltech for many years. Zwicky even appears in Vernon Smith’s autobiography “Discover – A Memoir”, about his experience of majoring in physics at Caltech. Zwicky was a strong advocate of morphology as a tool of thought, discovery, and invention, emphasizing that it can be applied to all situations in life. Interestingly, the morphological approach has been widely disregarded and not many books are available on this method.
- Gary King, Robert O. Keohane and Sidney Verba (1994). Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research. Princeton University Press.
- Henry E. Brady and David Collier (Eds.) (2010). Rethinking Social Inquiry. Rowman & Littlefield.
- King, Keohane and Verba’s book is seen as a fundamental point of reference on methodology in social sciences (in particular political sciences). The second book is an edited volume that contributes to the discussion and controversies on method.
- Rex B. Kline (2013). Beyond Significance Testing: Statistics Reform in the Behavioral Sciences. Springer.
- A timely book dealing with the overreliance on significance testing as the way to evaluate hypotheses.
- Charles F. Manski (2013). Public Policy in an Uncertain World: Analysis and Decisions. Harvard University Press.
- For those applied economists who are involved in policy evaluations. Here is the key message: “I hope to move policy analysis away from incredible certitude and toward honest portrayal of partial knowledge”.
- Joshua D. Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke (2015). Mastering Metrics: The Path from Cause to Effect. Princeton University Press.
- A couple of years have passed since they gave us Mostly Harmless Econometrics. This is their recent book, which is even more quirky and witty than the first one (image below, p. xiv).
- Roy J. Epstein (1987). A History of Econometrics. North-Holland.
- A book written out of a PhD thesis at Yale University under the supervision of Phillips. It is good to take a look at the history of econometrics and there are not that many books on it (others to consider are written by Qin Duo and Mary Morgan or the edited volume by de Marchi and Gilbert).
- Andrew Gelman and Deborah Nolan (2011). Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks. Oxford University Press.
- Roxy Peck: “Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks by Gelman and Nolan could have also been appropriately named Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Teaching Statistics, but were Afraid to Ask!”.
- Charles Wheelan (2013). Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread form the Data. W. W. Norton.
- An homage to the famous How to Lie with Statistics by the economist Wheelan, with a particular focus on intuition.
For further books on method see the October and November reading list in particular.