Economists would doom themselves to irrelevance if they surrendered standards of predictive success

McCloskey’s studies of the rhetoric of economics have been valuable and influential (1985, esp. ch. 5–7, McCloskey and Ziliak 2003, Ziliak and McCloskey 2008), but a great deal of her work during the 1980s and 1990s consists of philosophical critiques of economic methodology rather than studies of the rhetoric of economics. Her philosophical critiques are problematic, because the position sketched in the previous paragraph is hard to defend and potentially self-defeating. It is hard to defend, b