The public sphere

The current issue of Social Science History is devoted to a series of articles in honor of Charles Tilly (link), around the general theme of the "public sphere" (the theme of the Social Science History Association annual meeting in 2007). Tilly was an active presence in the Social Science History Association, and this issue recognizes Tilly's originality and influence.  The volume contains contributions by several distinguished historical sociologists, including Tilly, Andreas Koller, Craig Calhoun, Andrew Abbott, and Elisabeth Clemens.

The concept of the public sphere isn't a subject to which Tilly gave a lot of explicit attention; in fact, there is very little research on the social reality of the public sphere within comparative historical sociology quite generally.  The most directly relevant discussion of some of these topics in Tilly's work probably occurs in his 2007 book, Democracy.  But the topic is ripe for consideration by comparative and historical sociologists, and for this reason the current SSH issue is a welcome start.

Andreas Koller formulates the general research question about the public sphere in his introductory essay in these terms:

Despite its central relevance for the members of modern societies for determining the course of their own history through reasoned debate and public choice, the study of the public sphere is not an integrated research field. ... This introduction seeks to provide an overview of analytic and historical dimensions that enables one to decipher a number of discussions that are spread out over many disciplines and often proceed in multiple disciplinary terminologies.  Such a quest for an integrative framework is a necessary condition for well-defined comparative and historical research. (262-63)

Before a comparative historical sociologist could begin to investigate a phenomenon such as the "public sphere," it is necessary to have a preliminary conception of what we are talking about.  As Koller points out, most discussions of the concept begin with the ur-text in the study of the public sphere: Jurgen Habermas's 1962 book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society.  Here are some preliminary descriptions of the public sphere offered by several of the contributors to this special issue of SSH:

Andreas Koller: [The public sphere] refers to a public of speaker(s) and audience that organizes itself and determines its own future by the force of the better argument, and it refers to its object, the public good. (Koller, 263)

 Charles Tilly: No one has so far developed crisp measures of the public sphere's expansion and consolidation in one regime or another.  In that regard, comparative-historical research faces gigantic conceptual, technical, and empirical challenges.  But surely one indicator worth tracing is change in the frequency and character of gatherings in which people make collective claims on others, including public authorities. (Tilly, 292)

Craig Calhoun: It is instructive to situate the idea of the public sphere in this context.  This gives the influential account of Jurgen Habermas its central pathos: the public sphere arises as part of civil society, incorporating adults who have gained maturity and intellectual autonomy in another of its parts, the family.  It is oriented to forming rational-critical opinion on matters of universal interest to citizens, and through this to informing state policy. But it is debased and corrupted when the state-society division collapses amid bureaucratization, organized interest-group politics, and mass society in the twentieth century. (Calhoun, 302)

Craig Calhoun: The notion of the political public sphere centered on the idea that private persons might come together through reasoned communication to consider public issues and inform public policy. (Calhoun, 303)

Andrew Abbott: In this article I take this last as my definition of public spheres: public spheres are symbolic spaces within which a group's normative affairs are discussed in some sense for themselves.... So I shall take public spheres as an empirical possibility while making no detailed claims about their characteristics. (Abbott, 338)

Elisabeth Clemens: At the core of the philosophical legacy of the Enlightenment lies a vision of rational individuals governing themselves through collective deliberation.  By means of critical discourse, self-interested or private individuals reflect on common concerns and discover the nature of the public good, justice, and truth. (Clemens, 374)

What these snippets have in common is the idea of a public consisting of deliberative individuals engaging in debate over policies and legislation, in relation to conflicting ideas of the public good. (There is an evident connection between this definition and Rousseau's theories of the general will; link.) There is the idea here that a collectivity can arrive at a publicly shared conception of its good, through open and public debate.  And, in common with theorists of deliberative democracy, there is the idea that public debate can transform individual citizens' conceptions of themselves and the public good.  So debate is not merely expressive of current opinions and preferences; it is potentially transformative.

These ideas are expressed in the language of political philosophy and the theory of democracy.  But the subject matter becomes an object of study for sociologists when we realize that each aspect of the definition refers to a social reality that is highly variable across time, space, and culture.  So it is an empirical question, to consider to what extent Qing China, pre-revolutionary Iran, or medieval England had social realities that corresponded to any of these categories: the public intellectual, the engaged citizen, public debate, or public policy.  Was there a Qing public? Were matters of common concern debated openly or publicly, or were they decided behind closed doors by an Imperial bureaucracy?  Did subjects of the Qing state regard themselves as public individuals?

Tilly's essay in this volume focuses on one aspect of this sociological topic: to what extent did new forms of public debate and agitation begin to emerge in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?  He treats this as an empirical matter:

My collaborators and I gathered the evidence to examine how the development of British capitalism, transformation of the British state, and popular political struggle itself shaped changes in the ways that ordinary Britons made collecdtive claims -- changes in their repertoires of contention. (292)

He finds that there was a marked increase in the frequency of contentious gatherings, which he attributes to a rise in mass-based organizations and a mass-based public media.  (Much of this research is presented in his more extensive contribution to Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action, "Contentious Connections in Great Britain, Britain, 1828-34", with Lesley Wood.)

So this is one empirical approach that a comparative historical sociologist could take to the problem of trying to assess the scope and growth of the public sphere.  A very different approach is offered by Andrew Abbott in his contribution to the SSH volume, "Pragmatic Sociology and the Public Sphere: The Case of Charles Richmond Henderson."  Abbott moves from meso to micro in this piece.  He too counts things in order to assess the scope of the public sphere.  But in this case, what is counted is appearances in the Chicago Tribune.  Abbott attempts to gauge Charles Richmond Henderson's prominence in the public sphere by counting and classifying Henderson's presence in Chicago's leading newspaper.  How frequently does Henderson's name appear in the Tribune, in comparison to other prominent professors?

Henderson was chaplain and professor of sociology at the University of Chicago between 1892 and 1915, and it turns out that he had a remarkably high level of visibility in the Tribune.  He was a prominent public figure.  Abbott attempts to make sense of the public persona of Anderson through a brief intellectual and professional biography of the man; and he tries to arrive at some judgments about the causes and impact of his prominence.  "Over his quarter century at the University of Chicago, Henderson became one of Chicago's and even America's most visible reform figures" (342).  And much of his prominence was deliberate: Henderson sought out opportunities for bringing his convictions to the attention of a broader public than the university.  Clubs and conferences were a frequent venue; Henderson was deeply interested in bringing his ideas to the public through these venues.  And Abbott makes the important point that Chicago consisted, not of one public, but of an archipelago of publics: business elites, religious communities, immigrant communities, professional groups, ... (351).

Both of these empirical studies of certain aspects of the public sphere are intriguing and engaging.  Taken as a whole, the SSH volume provides a diverse palette of work, and it plainly does no more than scratch the surface of the kinds of sociological research that are suggested by the topic of the public sphere.  Abbott, Calhoun, Tilly, and the other contributors give an intriguing sense of the kinds of investigations that can be undertaken; there is much work to do in this area.  Consider this variety of questions that need to be posed about the public sphere from a comparative sociology point of view:

• How did the public sphere evolve in England between 1600 and 1900?
• How does the public sphere differ in France, Germany, and England?
• Did China have a public sphere in the late Imperial period?
• What are some important differences in repertoire and performance within the public spheres of different countries and periods?
• How do intellectuals participate in the public sphere in different times and places?
• What role does organized public protest play in the public sphere?

(The photo above captures two historical ends of the idea of the public sphere: the polis and the protest. It captures a major protest in Athens following the 2009 financial crisis of the Greek state.)

The public sphere

The current issue of Social Science History is devoted to a series of articles in honor of Charles Tilly (link), around the general theme of the "public sphere" (the theme of the Social Science History Association annual meeting in 2007). Tilly was an active presence in the Social Science History Association, and this issue recognizes Tilly's originality and influence.  The volume contains contributions by several distinguished historical sociologists, including Tilly, Andreas Koller, Craig Calhoun, Andrew Abbott, and Elisabeth Clemens.

The concept of the public sphere isn't a subject to which Tilly gave a lot of explicit attention; in fact, there is very little research on the social reality of the public sphere within comparative historical sociology quite generally.  The most directly relevant discussion of some of these topics in Tilly's work probably occurs in his 2007 book, Democracy.  But the topic is ripe for consideration by comparative and historical sociologists, and for this reason the current SSH issue is a welcome start.

Andreas Koller formulates the general research question about the public sphere in his introductory essay in these terms:

Despite its central relevance for the members of modern societies for determining the course of their own history through reasoned debate and public choice, the study of the public sphere is not an integrated research field. ... This introduction seeks to provide an overview of analytic and historical dimensions that enables one to decipher a number of discussions that are spread out over many disciplines and often proceed in multiple disciplinary terminologies.  Such a quest for an integrative framework is a necessary condition for well-defined comparative and historical research. (262-63)

Before a comparative historical sociologist could begin to investigate a phenomenon such as the "public sphere," it is necessary to have a preliminary conception of what we are talking about.  As Koller points out, most discussions of the concept begin with the ur-text in the study of the public sphere: Jurgen Habermas's 1962 book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society.  Here are some preliminary descriptions of the public sphere offered by several of the contributors to this special issue of SSH:

Andreas Koller: [The public sphere] refers to a public of speaker(s) and audience that organizes itself and determines its own future by the force of the better argument, and it refers to its object, the public good. (Koller, 263)

 Charles Tilly: No one has so far developed crisp measures of the public sphere's expansion and consolidation in one regime or another.  In that regard, comparative-historical research faces gigantic conceptual, technical, and empirical challenges.  But surely one indicator worth tracing is change in the frequency and character of gatherings in which people make collective claims on others, including public authorities. (Tilly, 292)

Craig Calhoun: It is instructive to situate the idea of the public sphere in this context.  This gives the influential account of Jurgen Habermas its central pathos: the public sphere arises as part of civil society, incorporating adults who have gained maturity and intellectual autonomy in another of its parts, the family.  It is oriented to forming rational-critical opinion on matters of universal interest to citizens, and through this to informing state policy. But it is debased and corrupted when the state-society division collapses amid bureaucratization, organized interest-group politics, and mass society in the twentieth century. (Calhoun, 302)

Craig Calhoun: The notion of the political public sphere centered on the idea that private persons might come together through reasoned communication to consider public issues and inform public policy. (Calhoun, 303)

Andrew Abbott: In this article I take this last as my definition of public spheres: public spheres are symbolic spaces within which a group's normative affairs are discussed in some sense for themselves.... So I shall take public spheres as an empirical possibility while making no detailed claims about their characteristics. (Abbott, 338)

Elisabeth Clemens: At the core of the philosophical legacy of the Enlightenment lies a vision of rational individuals governing themselves through collective deliberation.  By means of critical discourse, self-interested or private individuals reflect on common concerns and discover the nature of the public good, justice, and truth. (Clemens, 374)

What these snippets have in common is the idea of a public consisting of deliberative individuals engaging in debate over policies and legislation, in relation to conflicting ideas of the public good. (There is an evident connection between this definition and Rousseau's theories of the general will; link.) There is the idea here that a collectivity can arrive at a publicly shared conception of its good, through open and public debate.  And, in common with theorists of deliberative democracy, there is the idea that public debate can transform individual citizens' conceptions of themselves and the public good.  So debate is not merely expressive of current opinions and preferences; it is potentially transformative.

These ideas are expressed in the language of political philosophy and the theory of democracy.  But the subject matter becomes an object of study for sociologists when we realize that each aspect of the definition refers to a social reality that is highly variable across time, space, and culture.  So it is an empirical question, to consider to what extent Qing China, pre-revolutionary Iran, or medieval England had social realities that corresponded to any of these categories: the public intellectual, the engaged citizen, public debate, or public policy.  Was there a Qing public? Were matters of common concern debated openly or publicly, or were they decided behind closed doors by an Imperial bureaucracy?  Did subjects of the Qing state regard themselves as public individuals?

Tilly's essay in this volume focuses on one aspect of this sociological topic: to what extent did new forms of public debate and agitation begin to emerge in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?  He treats this as an empirical matter:

My collaborators and I gathered the evidence to examine how the development of British capitalism, transformation of the British state, and popular political struggle itself shaped changes in the ways that ordinary Britons made collecdtive claims -- changes in their repertoires of contention. (292)

He finds that there was a marked increase in the frequency of contentious gatherings, which he attributes to a rise in mass-based organizations and a mass-based public media.  (Much of this research is presented in his more extensive contribution to Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action, "Contentious Connections in Great Britain, Britain, 1828-34", with Lesley Wood.)

So this is one empirical approach that a comparative historical sociologist could take to the problem of trying to assess the scope and growth of the public sphere.  A very different approach is offered by Andrew Abbott in his contribution to the SSH volume, "Pragmatic Sociology and the Public Sphere: The Case of Charles Richmond Henderson."  Abbott moves from meso to micro in this piece.  He too counts things in order to assess the scope of the public sphere.  But in this case, what is counted is appearances in the Chicago Tribune.  Abbott attempts to gauge Charles Richmond Henderson's prominence in the public sphere by counting and classifying Henderson's presence in Chicago's leading newspaper.  How frequently does Henderson's name appear in the Tribune, in comparison to other prominent professors?

Henderson was chaplain and professor of sociology at the University of Chicago between 1892 and 1915, and it turns out that he had a remarkably high level of visibility in the Tribune.  He was a prominent public figure.  Abbott attempts to make sense of the public persona of Anderson through a brief intellectual and professional biography of the man; and he tries to arrive at some judgments about the causes and impact of his prominence.  "Over his quarter century at the University of Chicago, Henderson became one of Chicago's and even America's most visible reform figures" (342).  And much of his prominence was deliberate: Henderson sought out opportunities for bringing his convictions to the attention of a broader public than the university.  Clubs and conferences were a frequent venue; Henderson was deeply interested in bringing his ideas to the public through these venues.  And Abbott makes the important point that Chicago consisted, not of one public, but of an archipelago of publics: business elites, religious communities, immigrant communities, professional groups, ... (351).

Both of these empirical studies of certain aspects of the public sphere are intriguing and engaging.  Taken as a whole, the SSH volume provides a diverse palette of work, and it plainly does no more than scratch the surface of the kinds of sociological research that are suggested by the topic of the public sphere.  Abbott, Calhoun, Tilly, and the other contributors give an intriguing sense of the kinds of investigations that can be undertaken; there is much work to do in this area.  Consider this variety of questions that need to be posed about the public sphere from a comparative sociology point of view:

• How did the public sphere evolve in England between 1600 and 1900?
• How does the public sphere differ in France, Germany, and England?
• Did China have a public sphere in the late Imperial period?
• What are some important differences in repertoire and performance within the public spheres of different countries and periods?
• How do intellectuals participate in the public sphere in different times and places?
• What role does organized public protest play in the public sphere?

(The photo above captures two historical ends of the idea of the public sphere: the polis and the protest. It captures a major protest in Athens following the 2009 financial crisis of the Greek state.)

The public sphere

The current issue of Social Science History is devoted to a series of articles in honor of Charles Tilly (link), around the general theme of the "public sphere" (the theme of the Social Science History Association annual meeting in 2007). Tilly was an active presence in the Social Science History Association, and this issue recognizes Tilly's originality and influence.  The volume contains contributions by several distinguished historical sociologists, including Tilly, Andreas Koller, Craig Calhoun, Andrew Abbott, and Elisabeth Clemens.

The concept of the public sphere isn't a subject to which Tilly gave a lot of explicit attention; in fact, there is very little research on the social reality of the public sphere within comparative historical sociology quite generally.  The most directly relevant discussion of some of these topics in Tilly's work probably occurs in his 2007 book, Democracy.  But the topic is ripe for consideration by comparative and historical sociologists, and for this reason the current SSH issue is a welcome start.

Andreas Koller formulates the general research question about the public sphere in his introductory essay in these terms:

Despite its central relevance for the members of modern societies for determining the course of their own history through reasoned debate and public choice, the study of the public sphere is not an integrated research field. ... This introduction seeks to provide an overview of analytic and historical dimensions that enables one to decipher a number of discussions that are spread out over many disciplines and often proceed in multiple disciplinary terminologies.  Such a quest for an integrative framework is a necessary condition for well-defined comparative and historical research. (262-63)

Before a comparative historical sociologist could begin to investigate a phenomenon such as the "public sphere," it is necessary to have a preliminary conception of what we are talking about.  As Koller points out, most discussions of the concept begin with the ur-text in the study of the public sphere: Jurgen Habermas's 1962 book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society.  Here are some preliminary descriptions of the public sphere offered by several of the contributors to this special issue of SSH:

Andreas Koller: [The public sphere] refers to a public of speaker(s) and audience that organizes itself and determines its own future by the force of the better argument, and it refers to its object, the public good. (Koller, 263)

 Charles Tilly: No one has so far developed crisp measures of the public sphere's expansion and consolidation in one regime or another.  In that regard, comparative-historical research faces gigantic conceptual, technical, and empirical challenges.  But surely one indicator worth tracing is change in the frequency and character of gatherings in which people make collective claims on others, including public authorities. (Tilly, 292)

Craig Calhoun: It is instructive to situate the idea of the public sphere in this context.  This gives the influential account of Jurgen Habermas its central pathos: the public sphere arises as part of civil society, incorporating adults who have gained maturity and intellectual autonomy in another of its parts, the family.  It is oriented to forming rational-critical opinion on matters of universal interest to citizens, and through this to informing state policy. But it is debased and corrupted when the state-society division collapses amid bureaucratization, organized interest-group politics, and mass society in the twentieth century. (Calhoun, 302)

Craig Calhoun: The notion of the political public sphere centered on the idea that private persons might come together through reasoned communication to consider public issues and inform public policy. (Calhoun, 303)

Andrew Abbott: In this article I take this last as my definition of public spheres: public spheres are symbolic spaces within which a group's normative affairs are discussed in some sense for themselves.... So I shall take public spheres as an empirical possibility while making no detailed claims about their characteristics. (Abbott, 338)

Elisabeth Clemens: At the core of the philosophical legacy of the Enlightenment lies a vision of rational individuals governing themselves through collective deliberation.  By means of critical discourse, self-interested or private individuals reflect on common concerns and discover the nature of the public good, justice, and truth. (Clemens, 374)

What these snippets have in common is the idea of a public consisting of deliberative individuals engaging in debate over policies and legislation, in relation to conflicting ideas of the public good. (There is an evident connection between this definition and Rousseau's theories of the general will; link.) There is the idea here that a collectivity can arrive at a publicly shared conception of its good, through open and public debate.  And, in common with theorists of deliberative democracy, there is the idea that public debate can transform individual citizens' conceptions of themselves and the public good.  So debate is not merely expressive of current opinions and preferences; it is potentially transformative.

These ideas are expressed in the language of political philosophy and the theory of democracy.  But the subject matter becomes an object of study for sociologists when we realize that each aspect of the definition refers to a social reality that is highly variable across time, space, and culture.  So it is an empirical question, to consider to what extent Qing China, pre-revolutionary Iran, or medieval England had social realities that corresponded to any of these categories: the public intellectual, the engaged citizen, public debate, or public policy.  Was there a Qing public? Were matters of common concern debated openly or publicly, or were they decided behind closed doors by an Imperial bureaucracy?  Did subjects of the Qing state regard themselves as public individuals?

Tilly's essay in this volume focuses on one aspect of this sociological topic: to what extent did new forms of public debate and agitation begin to emerge in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?  He treats this as an empirical matter:

My collaborators and I gathered the evidence to examine how the development of British capitalism, transformation of the British state, and popular political struggle itself shaped changes in the ways that ordinary Britons made collecdtive claims -- changes in their repertoires of contention. (292)

He finds that there was a marked increase in the frequency of contentious gatherings, which he attributes to a rise in mass-based organizations and a mass-based public media.  (Much of this research is presented in his more extensive contribution to Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action, "Contentious Connections in Great Britain, Britain, 1828-34", with Lesley Wood.)

So this is one empirical approach that a comparative historical sociologist could take to the problem of trying to assess the scope and growth of the public sphere.  A very different approach is offered by Andrew Abbott in his contribution to the SSH volume, "Pragmatic Sociology and the Public Sphere: The Case of Charles Richmond Henderson."  Abbott moves from meso to micro in this piece.  He too counts things in order to assess the scope of the public sphere.  But in this case, what is counted is appearances in the Chicago Tribune.  Abbott attempts to gauge Charles Richmond Henderson's prominence in the public sphere by counting and classifying Henderson's presence in Chicago's leading newspaper.  How frequently does Henderson's name appear in the Tribune, in comparison to other prominent professors?

Henderson was chaplain and professor of sociology at the University of Chicago between 1892 and 1915, and it turns out that he had a remarkably high level of visibility in the Tribune.  He was a prominent public figure.  Abbott attempts to make sense of the public persona of Anderson through a brief intellectual and professional biography of the man; and he tries to arrive at some judgments about the causes and impact of his prominence.  "Over his quarter century at the University of Chicago, Henderson became one of Chicago's and even America's most visible reform figures" (342).  And much of his prominence was deliberate: Henderson sought out opportunities for bringing his convictions to the attention of a broader public than the university.  Clubs and conferences were a frequent venue; Henderson was deeply interested in bringing his ideas to the public through these venues.  And Abbott makes the important point that Chicago consisted, not of one public, but of an archipelago of publics: business elites, religious communities, immigrant communities, professional groups, ... (351).

Both of these empirical studies of certain aspects of the public sphere are intriguing and engaging.  Taken as a whole, the SSH volume provides a diverse palette of work, and it plainly does no more than scratch the surface of the kinds of sociological research that are suggested by the topic of the public sphere.  Abbott, Calhoun, Tilly, and the other contributors give an intriguing sense of the kinds of investigations that can be undertaken; there is much work to do in this area.  Consider this variety of questions that need to be posed about the public sphere from a comparative sociology point of view:

• How did the public sphere evolve in England between 1600 and 1900?
• How does the public sphere differ in France, Germany, and England?
• Did China have a public sphere in the late Imperial period?
• What are some important differences in repertoire and performance within the public spheres of different countries and periods?
• How do intellectuals participate in the public sphere in different times and places?
• What role does organized public protest play in the public sphere?

(The photo above captures two historical ends of the idea of the public sphere: the polis and the protest. It captures a major protest in Athens following the 2009 financial crisis of the Greek state.)

Development economics in historical context

Hollis Chenery and T. N. Srinivasan published the Handbook of Development Economics in 1988.  It was state-of-the-art in the late 1980s.  It is interesting to look back at the Handbook twenty-two years later to see how it stands up today.

First, the contributors.  The volume is a dream-team of development thinkers from the 1970s and 1980s: Amartya Sen, Arthur Lewis, Pranab Bardhan, Joseph Stiglitz, Peter Timmer, Nancy Birdsall, Paul Streeten, and Dwight Perkins, to name only a small subset of the authors.  (There are 33 essays in volumes I and II.)  Several currently important figures are not represented -- Arturo Escobar, Jeffrey Sachs, and Dani Rodrik, for example.  Escobar's Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World appeared in 1994; Jeffrey Sachs's The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time didn't appear until 2005; and Dani Rodrik's One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth appeared in 2008.  So it is certainly true that the field has moved forward with the emergence of new voices and perspectives since 1988.  But it is also true that the volume represents a very deep body of knowledge about some of the dynamics and policy choices pertaining to economic development.

More important is the question of the range of perspectives on development represented in the volume.  Development thinking has tended to swing from progressive to neo-liberal over the decades.  Progressives have paid more attention to distribution, poverty, and social provisioning; whereas neo-liberals have focused on markets and "getting the prices right," with little appetite for redistribution, government subsidies, or serious efforts at poverty reduction.  Gunnar Myrdal, Amartya Sen, and Arturo Escobar represent three generations of progressive development theorists; perhaps Peter Timmer, Malcolm Gillis, and Jeffrey Williamson fall closer to the neo-liberal end of the spectrum.  I would judge that the Handbook does a pretty good job of finding the middle of the spectrum.  Chenery's own emphasis on the importance of redistribution in development (Redistribution with Growth) places him closer to the progressive end, along with Pranab Bardhan, Irma Adelman, and Lance Taylor (each of whom has a contribution in the volume).  The book pays attention to "alternative approaches" to economic development as well as poverty-related issues like health and nutrition.  The book does a good job of combining a clear vision of the goals of economic development -- improvement of human welfare -- with technical economic analysis of growth, labor markets, and trade.  And many of the authors explicitly recognize the point that development economics benefits from theoretical pluralism; the approach is not narrowly neo-classical.

Here are a few interesting observations from several contributors:

Pranab Bardhan:

Development economics as a separate branch of economics originated in a widespread perception of the limited usefulness of orthodox economics, and even though its pristine separatism has mellowed over the years it retains to this day its contrary, unruly, if somewhat flaky, image in the eyes of mainstream economics.  Standard neoclassical economics is mainly on the defensive in this terain and a number of alternative approaches clash and contend for our attention. (40)

Joseph Stiglitz:

The central questions facing development economics are: Why is it that some countries are so much poorer than others?  What can be done to make them grow faster? Faster growth is needed if the gap in living standards is not to be widened even further. (94)

J.G. Williamson:

What explains the timing and the extent of the transition from a traditional rural to a modern urban society? Why does city growth speed up in early development and slow down in later stages? What role does migration play in the process, and do migrants make rational location decisions? Do urban labor markets serve to absorb urban immigrants quickly? Are rural emigrants driven by "push" conditions in the countryside or by "pull" conditions in the cities? Is the Third World "overurbanized"? (425)

T.P. Schultz:

The record of sustained modern growth in real per capita income cannot be accounted for by the accumulation of conventional units of physical capital or by the increased applicaiton of hours of labor per capita.  The source of modern economic growth are sought instead in the changing quality of labor and capital, in the more comprehensive accounting of other inputs, and in change of organization, policy environment, or technology.  ... Research on various aspects of the microeconomic relationshipb etween education and development has expanded rapidly, forging a consensus on questions for study and appropriate methodologies to address these questions. ... Studies across persons, households, farms, and firms have documented, first generally in the United States and then in many low income countries, strong empirical regularities between educational attainment of populations and their productivity and performance in both market and nonmarket (home) production activities.  (544)

Jere Behrman and Anil Deolalikar:

Health and nutrition are important as ends in themselves and often are emphasized as critical components of basic needs in developing countries.  In addition they may be channels through which productivity and distributional goals of developing societies may be pursued effectively if, as is often hypothesized, the productivity of low-income persons in work and in human- capital formation is positively affected by health and nutrition status. (633)

Several things are noteworthy in reviewing the contents and methods of the Handbook -- issues and perspectives that would now be regarded as crucial.

A phrase that does not occur in the volume is "Washington Consensus."  This concept became current in the 1990s after being introduced by John Williamson in 1990 (link).  Here is how Williamson puts his point: "The paper identifies and discusses 10 policy instruments about whose proper deployment Washington can muster a reasonable degree of consensus." He identifies ten policy goals as constituting the Washington Consensus: Fiscal Deficits, Public Expenditure Priorities, Tax Reform, Interest Rates, The Exchange Rate, Trade Policy, Foreign Direct Investment, Privatization, Deregulation, and Property Rights. It is apparent that this list is heavily tilted towards the neo-liberal end of the spectrum.  By contrast, consider the Millenium Goals adopted by the United Nations in 2000 (link): End Hunger, Universal Education, Gender Equity, Child Health, Maternal Health, Combat HIV/AIDS, Environmental Sustainability, Global Partnership.  The Millenium Goals are focused on ending world poverty, while the Washington Consensus is focused on achieving effective market institutions and trading systems globally.  The Handbook isn't a sourcebook or a polemic in support of the neo-liberal agenda; but neither is it emphatic in its treatment of poverty.

Another term that does not occur in the volume is "globalization."  There are discussions of international trade, migration, capital flows, transnational corporations, and credit markets -- important components of contemporary debates about globalization.  But the concept space involved in the idea of economic development had not yet fully highlighted the importance of global interconnectivity.

Third, the Handbook gives virtually no attention to sustainability, resource depletion, and the environment.  These are now regarded as crucial aspects of the challenge of economic development.  Taxation, trade, and governance come in for repeated treatments; but environmental sustainability is not raised as a significant issue.

Finally, the Handbook doesn't give central priority to the issues of poverty alleviation and inequality that were already becoming central for some development economists, including Amartya Sen.  Sen's central ideas of functionings, freedom, and capabilities are expressed in his opening chapter to the volume.  But the bulk of the contributions to the Handbook don't begin with poverty, but rather more specific questions about growth, modernization, trade, and population.  The conceptual shift that Sen's writings would eventually bring to the field had not yet had full effect.

It is also interesting to examine the first and second editions of an important textbook on development economics that was roughly contemporary to the Handbook.  Malcolm Gillis, Dwight Perkins, Michael Roemer, and Donald Snodgrass's Economics of Development was published a few years earlier than the Handbook in 1983 and 1987.  There is a high degree of conceptual and organizational similarity between the two treatments of the economics of development, including topics, approaches, and models and methods.

To get a sense for how the discipline of development economics has shifted since 1988, take a look at the topics and readings included in the course on Economic Development offered by Rohini Pande and Dani Rodrik (link).  Addressing poverty is the central focus in this conceptualization of the field; there is lots of attention to the components of human wellbeing (health, education, nutrition); and the syllabus pays a good deal of attention to issues of institutions and governance within the development process.

Development economics in historical context

Hollis Chenery and T. N. Srinivasan published the Handbook of Development Economics in 1988.  It was state-of-the-art in the late 1980s.  It is interesting to look back at the Handbook twenty-two years later to see how it stands up today.

First, the contributors.  The volume is a dream-team of development thinkers from the 1970s and 1980s: Amartya Sen, Arthur Lewis, Pranab Bardhan, Joseph Stiglitz, Peter Timmer, Nancy Birdsall, Paul Streeten, and Dwight Perkins, to name only a small subset of the authors.  (There are 33 essays in volumes I and II.)  Several currently important figures are not represented -- Arturo Escobar, Jeffrey Sachs, and Dani Rodrik, for example.  Escobar's Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World appeared in 1994; Jeffrey Sachs's The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time didn't appear until 2005; and Dani Rodrik's One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth appeared in 2008.  So it is certainly true that the field has moved forward with the emergence of new voices and perspectives since 1988.  But it is also true that the volume represents a very deep body of knowledge about some of the dynamics and policy choices pertaining to economic development.

More important is the question of the range of perspectives on development represented in the volume.  Development thinking has tended to swing from progressive to neo-liberal over the decades.  Progressives have paid more attention to distribution, poverty, and social provisioning; whereas neo-liberals have focused on markets and "getting the prices right," with little appetite for redistribution, government subsidies, or serious efforts at poverty reduction.  Gunnar Myrdal, Amartya Sen, and Arturo Escobar represent three generations of progressive development theorists; perhaps Peter Timmer, Malcolm Gillis, and Jeffrey Williamson fall closer to the neo-liberal end of the spectrum.  I would judge that the Handbook does a pretty good job of finding the middle of the spectrum.  Chenery's own emphasis on the importance of redistribution in development (Redistribution with Growth) places him closer to the progressive end, along with Pranab Bardhan, Irma Adelman, and Lance Taylor (each of whom has a contribution in the volume).  The book pays attention to "alternative approaches" to economic development as well as poverty-related issues like health and nutrition.  The book does a good job of combining a clear vision of the goals of economic development -- improvement of human welfare -- with technical economic analysis of growth, labor markets, and trade.  And many of the authors explicitly recognize the point that development economics benefits from theoretical pluralism; the approach is not narrowly neo-classical.

Here are a few interesting observations from several contributors:

Pranab Bardhan:

Development economics as a separate branch of economics originated in a widespread perception of the limited usefulness of orthodox economics, and even though its pristine separatism has mellowed over the years it retains to this day its contrary, unruly, if somewhat flaky, image in the eyes of mainstream economics.  Standard neoclassical economics is mainly on the defensive in this terain and a number of alternative approaches clash and contend for our attention. (40)

Joseph Stiglitz:

The central questions facing development economics are: Why is it that some countries are so much poorer than others?  What can be done to make them grow faster? Faster growth is needed if the gap in living standards is not to be widened even further. (94)

J.G. Williamson:

What explains the timing and the extent of the transition from a traditional rural to a modern urban society? Why does city growth speed up in early development and slow down in later stages? What role does migration play in the process, and do migrants make rational location decisions? Do urban labor markets serve to absorb urban immigrants quickly? Are rural emigrants driven by "push" conditions in the countryside or by "pull" conditions in the cities? Is the Third World "overurbanized"? (425)

T.P. Schultz:

The record of sustained modern growth in real per capita income cannot be accounted for by the accumulation of conventional units of physical capital or by the increased applicaiton of hours of labor per capita.  The source of modern economic growth are sought instead in the changing quality of labor and capital, in the more comprehensive accounting of other inputs, and in change of organization, policy environment, or technology.  ... Research on various aspects of the microeconomic relationshipb etween education and development has expanded rapidly, forging a consensus on questions for study and appropriate methodologies to address these questions. ... Studies across persons, households, farms, and firms have documented, first generally in the United States and then in many low income countries, strong empirical regularities between educational attainment of populations and their productivity and performance in both market and nonmarket (home) production activities.  (544)

Jere Behrman and Anil Deolalikar:

Health and nutrition are important as ends in themselves and often are emphasized as critical components of basic needs in developing countries.  In addition they may be channels through which productivity and distributional goals of developing societies may be pursued effectively if, as is often hypothesized, the productivity of low-income persons in work and in human- capital formation is positively affected by health and nutrition status. (633)

Several things are noteworthy in reviewing the contents and methods of the Handbook -- issues and perspectives that would now be regarded as crucial.

A phrase that does not occur in the volume is "Washington Consensus."  This concept became current in the 1990s after being introduced by John Williamson in 1990 (link).  Here is how Williamson puts his point: "The paper identifies and discusses 10 policy instruments about whose proper deployment Washington can muster a reasonable degree of consensus." He identifies ten policy goals as constituting the Washington Consensus: Fiscal Deficits, Public Expenditure Priorities, Tax Reform, Interest Rates, The Exchange Rate, Trade Policy, Foreign Direct Investment, Privatization, Deregulation, and Property Rights. It is apparent that this list is heavily tilted towards the neo-liberal end of the spectrum.  By contrast, consider the Millenium Goals adopted by the United Nations in 2000 (link): End Hunger, Universal Education, Gender Equity, Child Health, Maternal Health, Combat HIV/AIDS, Environmental Sustainability, Global Partnership.  The Millenium Goals are focused on ending world poverty, while the Washington Consensus is focused on achieving effective market institutions and trading systems globally.  The Handbook isn't a sourcebook or a polemic in support of the neo-liberal agenda; but neither is it emphatic in its treatment of poverty.

Another term that does not occur in the volume is "globalization."  There are discussions of international trade, migration, capital flows, transnational corporations, and credit markets -- important components of contemporary debates about globalization.  But the concept space involved in the idea of economic development had not yet fully highlighted the importance of global interconnectivity.

Third, the Handbook gives virtually no attention to sustainability, resource depletion, and the environment.  These are now regarded as crucial aspects of the challenge of economic development.  Taxation, trade, and governance come in for repeated treatments; but environmental sustainability is not raised as a significant issue.

Finally, the Handbook doesn't give central priority to the issues of poverty alleviation and inequality that were already becoming central for some development economists, including Amartya Sen.  Sen's central ideas of functionings, freedom, and capabilities are expressed in his opening chapter to the volume.  But the bulk of the contributions to the Handbook don't begin with poverty, but rather more specific questions about growth, modernization, trade, and population.  The conceptual shift that Sen's writings would eventually bring to the field had not yet had full effect.

It is also interesting to examine the first and second editions of an important textbook on development economics that was roughly contemporary to the Handbook.  Malcolm Gillis, Dwight Perkins, Michael Roemer, and Donald Snodgrass's Economics of Development was published a few years earlier than the Handbook in 1983 and 1987.  There is a high degree of conceptual and organizational similarity between the two treatments of the economics of development, including topics, approaches, and models and methods.

To get a sense for how the discipline of development economics has shifted since 1988, take a look at the topics and readings included in the course on Economic Development offered by Rohini Pande and Dani Rodrik (link).  Addressing poverty is the central focus in this conceptualization of the field; there is lots of attention to the components of human wellbeing (health, education, nutrition); and the syllabus pays a good deal of attention to issues of institutions and governance within the development process.

Development economics in historical context

Hollis Chenery and T. N. Srinivasan published the Handbook of Development Economics in 1988.  It was state-of-the-art in the late 1980s.  It is interesting to look back at the Handbook twenty-two years later to see how it stands up today.

First, the contributors.  The volume is a dream-team of development thinkers from the 1970s and 1980s: Amartya Sen, Arthur Lewis, Pranab Bardhan, Joseph Stiglitz, Peter Timmer, Nancy Birdsall, Paul Streeten, and Dwight Perkins, to name only a small subset of the authors.  (There are 33 essays in volumes I and II.)  Several currently important figures are not represented -- Arturo Escobar, Jeffrey Sachs, and Dani Rodrik, for example.  Escobar's Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World appeared in 1994; Jeffrey Sachs's The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time didn't appear until 2005; and Dani Rodrik's One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth appeared in 2008.  So it is certainly true that the field has moved forward with the emergence of new voices and perspectives since 1988.  But it is also true that the volume represents a very deep body of knowledge about some of the dynamics and policy choices pertaining to economic development.

More important is the question of the range of perspectives on development represented in the volume.  Development thinking has tended to swing from progressive to neo-liberal over the decades.  Progressives have paid more attention to distribution, poverty, and social provisioning; whereas neo-liberals have focused on markets and "getting the prices right," with little appetite for redistribution, government subsidies, or serious efforts at poverty reduction.  Gunnar Myrdal, Amartya Sen, and Arturo Escobar represent three generations of progressive development theorists; perhaps Peter Timmer, Malcolm Gillis, and Jeffrey Williamson fall closer to the neo-liberal end of the spectrum.  I would judge that the Handbook does a pretty good job of finding the middle of the spectrum.  Chenery's own emphasis on the importance of redistribution in development (Redistribution with Growth) places him closer to the progressive end, along with Pranab Bardhan, Irma Adelman, and Lance Taylor (each of whom has a contribution in the volume).  The book pays attention to "alternative approaches" to economic development as well as poverty-related issues like health and nutrition.  The book does a good job of combining a clear vision of the goals of economic development -- improvement of human welfare -- with technical economic analysis of growth, labor markets, and trade.  And many of the authors explicitly recognize the point that development economics benefits from theoretical pluralism; the approach is not narrowly neo-classical.

Here are a few interesting observations from several contributors:

Pranab Bardhan:

Development economics as a separate branch of economics originated in a widespread perception of the limited usefulness of orthodox economics, and even though its pristine separatism has mellowed over the years it retains to this day its contrary, unruly, if somewhat flaky, image in the eyes of mainstream economics.  Standard neoclassical economics is mainly on the defensive in this terain and a number of alternative approaches clash and contend for our attention. (40)

Joseph Stiglitz:

The central questions facing development economics are: Why is it that some countries are so much poorer than others?  What can be done to make them grow faster? Faster growth is needed if the gap in living standards is not to be widened even further. (94)

J.G. Williamson:

What explains the timing and the extent of the transition from a traditional rural to a modern urban society? Why does city growth speed up in early development and slow down in later stages? What role does migration play in the process, and do migrants make rational location decisions? Do urban labor markets serve to absorb urban immigrants quickly? Are rural emigrants driven by "push" conditions in the countryside or by "pull" conditions in the cities? Is the Third World "overurbanized"? (425)

T.P. Schultz:

The record of sustained modern growth in real per capita income cannot be accounted for by the accumulation of conventional units of physical capital or by the increased applicaiton of hours of labor per capita.  The source of modern economic growth are sought instead in the changing quality of labor and capital, in the more comprehensive accounting of other inputs, and in change of organization, policy environment, or technology.  ... Research on various aspects of the microeconomic relationshipb etween education and development has expanded rapidly, forging a consensus on questions for study and appropriate methodologies to address these questions. ... Studies across persons, households, farms, and firms have documented, first generally in the United States and then in many low income countries, strong empirical regularities between educational attainment of populations and their productivity and performance in both market and nonmarket (home) production activities.  (544)

Jere Behrman and Anil Deolalikar:

Health and nutrition are important as ends in themselves and often are emphasized as critical components of basic needs in developing countries.  In addition they may be channels through which productivity and distributional goals of developing societies may be pursued effectively if, as is often hypothesized, the productivity of low-income persons in work and in human- capital formation is positively affected by health and nutrition status. (633)

Several things are noteworthy in reviewing the contents and methods of the Handbook -- issues and perspectives that would now be regarded as crucial.

A phrase that does not occur in the volume is "Washington Consensus."  This concept became current in the 1990s after being introduced by John Williamson in 1990 (link).  Here is how Williamson puts his point: "The paper identifies and discusses 10 policy instruments about whose proper deployment Washington can muster a reasonable degree of consensus." He identifies ten policy goals as constituting the Washington Consensus: Fiscal Deficits, Public Expenditure Priorities, Tax Reform, Interest Rates, The Exchange Rate, Trade Policy, Foreign Direct Investment, Privatization, Deregulation, and Property Rights. It is apparent that this list is heavily tilted towards the neo-liberal end of the spectrum.  By contrast, consider the Millenium Goals adopted by the United Nations in 2000 (link): End Hunger, Universal Education, Gender Equity, Child Health, Maternal Health, Combat HIV/AIDS, Environmental Sustainability, Global Partnership.  The Millenium Goals are focused on ending world poverty, while the Washington Consensus is focused on achieving effective market institutions and trading systems globally.  The Handbook isn't a sourcebook or a polemic in support of the neo-liberal agenda; but neither is it emphatic in its treatment of poverty.

Another term that does not occur in the volume is "globalization."  There are discussions of international trade, migration, capital flows, transnational corporations, and credit markets -- important components of contemporary debates about globalization.  But the concept space involved in the idea of economic development had not yet fully highlighted the importance of global interconnectivity.

Third, the Handbook gives virtually no attention to sustainability, resource depletion, and the environment.  These are now regarded as crucial aspects of the challenge of economic development.  Taxation, trade, and governance come in for repeated treatments; but environmental sustainability is not raised as a significant issue.

Finally, the Handbook doesn't give central priority to the issues of poverty alleviation and inequality that were already becoming central for some development economists, including Amartya Sen.  Sen's central ideas of functionings, freedom, and capabilities are expressed in his opening chapter to the volume.  But the bulk of the contributions to the Handbook don't begin with poverty, but rather more specific questions about growth, modernization, trade, and population.  The conceptual shift that Sen's writings would eventually bring to the field had not yet had full effect.

It is also interesting to examine the first and second editions of an important textbook on development economics that was roughly contemporary to the Handbook.  Malcolm Gillis, Dwight Perkins, Michael Roemer, and Donald Snodgrass's Economics of Development was published a few years earlier than the Handbook in 1983 and 1987.  There is a high degree of conceptual and organizational similarity between the two treatments of the economics of development, including topics, approaches, and models and methods.

To get a sense for how the discipline of development economics has shifted since 1988, take a look at the topics and readings included in the course on Economic Development offered by Rohini Pande and Dani Rodrik (link).  Addressing poverty is the central focus in this conceptualization of the field; there is lots of attention to the components of human wellbeing (health, education, nutrition); and the syllabus pays a good deal of attention to issues of institutions and governance within the development process.

Criteria for assessing economic models

How can we assess the epistemic warrant of an economic model that purports to represent some aspects of economic reality?  The general problem of assessing the credibility of an economic model can be broken down into more specific questions concerning the validity, comprehensiveness, robustness, reliability, and autonomy of the model. Here are initial definitions of these concepts.

• Validity is a measure of the degree to which the assumptions employed in the construction of the model are thought to correspond to the real processes underlying the phenomena represented by the model. 
• Comprehensiveness is the degree to which the model is thought to succeed in capturing the major causal factors that influence the features of the behavior of the system in which we are interested. 
• Robustness is a measure of the degree to which the results of the model persist under small perturbations in the settings of parameters, formulation of equations, etc. 
• Autonomy refers to the stability of the model's results in face of variation of contextual factors. 
• Reliability is a measure of the degree of confidence we can have in the data employed in setting the values of the parameters. 

These are features of models that can be investigated more or less independently and prior to examination of the empirical success or failure of the predictions of the model.

Let us look more closely at these standards of adequacy. The discussion of realism elsewhere suggests that we may attempt to validate the model deductively, by examining each of the assumptions underlying construction of the model for its plausibility or realism (link). (This resembles Mill's "deductive method" of theory evaluation.) Economists are highly confident in the underlying general equilibrium theory. The theory is incomplete (or, in Daniel Hausman's language, inexact; link), in that economic outcomes are not wholly determined by purely economic forces. But within its scope economists are confident that the theory identifies the main causal processes: an equilibration of supply and demand through market-determined prices.

Validity can be assessed through direct inspection of the substantive economic assumptions of the model: the formulation of consumer and firm behavior, the representation of production and consumption functions, the closure rules, and the like. To the extent that the particular formulation embodied in the model is supported by accepted economic theory, the validity of the model is enhanced. On the other hand, if particular formulations appear to be ad hoc (introduced, perhaps, to make the problem more tractable), the validity of the model is reduced. If, for example, the model assumes linear demand functions and we judge that this is a highly unrealistic assumption about the real underlying demand functions, then we will have less confidence in the predictive results of the model.

Unfortunately, there can be no fixed standard of evaluation concerning the validity of a model. All models make simplifying and idealizing assumptions; so to that extent they deviate from literal realism. And the question of whether a given idealization is felicitous or not cannot always be resolved on antecedent theoretical grounds; instead, it is necessary to look at the overall empirical adequacy of the model. The adequacy of the assumption of fixed coefficients of production cannot be assessed a priori; in some contexts and for some purposes it is a reasonable approximation of the economic reality, while in other cases it introduces unacceptable distortion of the actual economic processes (when input substitution is extensive). What can be said concerning the validity of a model's assumptions is rather minimal but not entirely vacuous. The assumptions should be consistent with existing economic theory; they should be reasonable and motivated formulations of background economic principles; and they should be implemented in a mathematically acceptable fashion.

Comprehensiveness too is a weak constraint on economic models. It is plain that all economic theories and models disregard some causal factors in order to isolate the workings of specific economic mechanisms; moreover, there will always be economic forces that have not been represented within the model. So judgment of the comprehensiveness of a model depends on a qualitative assessment of the relative importance of various economic and non-economic factors in the particular system under analysis. If a given factor seems to be economically important (e.g. input substitution) but unrepresented within the model, then the model loses points on comprehensiveness.

Robustness can be directly assessed through a technique widely used by economists, sensitivity analysis. The model is run a large number of times, varying the values assigned to parameters (reflecting the range of uncertainty in estimates or observations). If the model continues to have qualitatively similar findings, it is said to be robust. If solutions vary wildly under small perturbations of the parameter settings, the model is rightly thought to be a poor indicator of the underlying economic mechanisms.

Autonomy is the theoretical equivalent of robustness. It is a measure of the stability of the model under changes of assumptions about the causal background of the system. If the model's results are highly sensitive to changes in the environment within which the modeled processes take place, then we should be suspicious of the results of the model.

Assessment of reliability is also somewhat more straightforward than comprehensiveness and validity. The empirical data used to set parameters and exogenous variables have been gathered through specific well-understood procedures, and it is mandatory that we give some account of the precision of the resulting data.

Note that reliability and robustness interact; if we find that the model is highly robust with respect to a particular set of parameters, then the unreliability of estimates of those parameters will not have much effect on the reliability of the model itself. In this case it is enough to have "stylized facts" governing the parameters that are used: roughly 60% of workers' income is spent on food, 0% is saved, etc.

Failures along each of these lines can be illustrated easily.

1. The model assumes that prices are determined on the basis of markup pricing (costs plus a fixed exogenous markup rate and wage). In fact, however, we might believe (along neoclassical lines) that prices, wages, and the profit rate are all endogenous, so that markup pricing misrepresents the underlying price mechanism. This would be a failure of validity; the model is premised on assumptions that may not hold. 
2. The model is premised on a two-sector analysis of the economy. However, energy production and consumption turn out to be economically crucial factors in the performance of the economy, and these effects are overlooked unless we represent the energy sector separately. This would be a failure of comprehensiveness; there is an economically significant factor that is not represented in the model. 
3. We rerun the model assuming a slightly altered set of production coefficients, and we find that the predictions are substantially different: the increase in income is only 33% of what it was, and deficits are only half what they were. This is a failure of robustness; once we know that the model is extremely sensitive to variations in the parameters, we have strong reason to doubt its predictions. The accuracy of measurement of parameters is limited, so we can be confident that remeasurement would produce different values. So we can in turn expect that the simulation will arrive at different values for the endogenous variables. 
4. Suppose that our model of income distribution in a developing economy is premised on the international trading arrangements embodied in GATT. The model is designed to represent the domestic causal relations between food subsidies and the pattern of income distribution across classes. If the results of the model change substantially upon dropping the GATT assumption, then the model is not autonomous with respect to international trading arrangements. 
5. Finally, we examine the data underlying the consumption functions and we find that these derive from one household study in one Mexican state, involving 300 households. Moreover, we determine that the model is sensitive to the parameters defining consumption functions. On this scenario we have little reason to expect that the estimates derived from the household study are reliable estimates of consumption in all social classes all across Mexico; and therefore we have little reason to depend on the predictions of the model. This is a failure of reliability. 

These factors--validity, comprehensiveness, robustness, autonomy, and reliability--figure into our assessment of the antecedent credibility of a given model. If the model is judged to be reasonably valid and comprehensive; if it appears to be fairly robust and autonomous; and if the empirical data on which it rests appears to be reliable; then we have reason to believe that the model is a reasonable representation of the underlying economic reality. But this deductive validation of the model does not take us far enough. These are reasons to have a priori confidence in the model. But we need as well to have a basis for a posteriori confidence in the particular results of this specific model. And since there are many well-known ways in which a generally well-constructed model can nonetheless miss the mark--incompleteness of the causal field, failure of ceteris paribus clauses, poor data or poor estimates of the exogenous variables and parameters, proliferation of error to the point where the solution has no value, and path-dependence of the equilibrium solution--we need to have some way of empirically evaluating the results of the model.

(Here is an application of these ideas to computable general equilibrium (CGE) models in an article published in On the Reliability of Economic Models: Essays in the Philosophy of Economics; link.  See also Lance Taylor's reply and discussion in the same volume.)