Friedman starts his essay by determining in the a normal way anywhere between confident and you will normative economics and you will conjecturing one to plan issues are usually really conflicts regarding consequences away from possibilities and certainly will therefore feel solved by improvements when you look at the positive business economics. Turning to confident economics, Friedman asserts (in place of conflict) one to correct forecast in regards to the phenomena not even seen is the biggest goal of most of the confident sciences.
Because it’s tough and sometimes impractical to perform studies and because brand new uncontrolled phenomena economists to see are difficult so you can interpret (using an identical causal difficulty you to definitely annoyed Mill), it is hard to evaluate if a certain theory are an effective a beneficial reason behind predictions or otherwise not. Continue reading