I am not in any way a conspiracy theorist and have no time for such nonsense.
Much theoretical work, of course, focuses on existing economic institutions. The theorist wants to explain or forecast the economic or social outcomes that these institutions generate.
I would not call myself a veteran conspiracy theorist. Or an obsessed one. I pretty much peaked on the whole conspiracy theory thing in the '60s, with the grassy knoll, who really killed JFK, and who ordered the hit on Lee Harvey Oswald.
Well, let me, first of all, say, that as a microtonal composer, I've never been much of a theorist.
The important thing is to think about theory in life in that way. And I think we don't have to be theorists, we don't have to have gone to the academy, or to the university to learn theory and to be a theorist of gender.
Is the world ruled by strict laws or not? This question I regard as metaphysical. The laws we find are always hypotheses; which means that they may always be superseded, and that they may possibly be deduced from probability estimates. Yet denying causality would be the same as attempting to persuade the theorist to give up his search; and that such an attempt cannot be backed by anything like a proof.
I'm not the religious-conspiracy-theorist go-to guy, particularly. But I think it's really kind of silly to try to equate birds falling out of the sky with some kind of an end-times theory.
I have been gradually coming under the conviction, disturbing for a professional theorist, that there is no such thing as economics - there is only social science applied to economic problems.
A conspiracy theorist is a person who tacitly admits that they have insufficient data to prove their points. A conspiracy is a battle cry of a person with insufficient data.
I'm a theorist, not an institutionalist.
I was trained as an economic theorist; my job at MIT was as an economic theorist. At some level that's still part of my identity.
There is no great harm in the theorist who makes up a new theory to fit a new event. But the theorist who starts with a false theory and then sees everything as making it come true is the most dangerous enemy of human reason.
