Les Cleistocactus

Heuristics as Plausible Models of Rationality?

“…The ideal type would not be of any help in the present context, however, if Weber had not made clear that scienti c idealizations are not independent of the practical ideas of common man. He is convinced that ordinary people use simple and uncritical forms of heuristical reasoning in everyday life, and even that scienti c and everyday concepts interact in complex and contingent ways (Weber 1968(Weber [1904:205). The conceptual point of departure of Gigerenzer and colleagues is in line with Weber's results.…”

“…In his essay on social-scienti c 'objectivity' (1968 [1904]) he characterizes the well-known methodological 'ideal type' as a subtle and speci cally ctional departure from reality. Due to its 'heuristical' (Weber 1968(Weber [1904:190, my translations) character an ideal type is 'no "hypothesis"', though it 'wants to point out a direction for the creation of hypotheses'. Weber underlines that an ideal type cannot and should not be a representation of reality, but an 'abstraction' and 'accentuation' ('Steigerung';Weber 1968Weber [1904:201) of but the relevant aspects of a phenomenon.…”

“…Due to its 'heuristical' (Weber 1968(Weber [1904:190, my translations) character an ideal type is 'no "hypothesis"', though it 'wants to point out a direction for the creation of hypotheses'. Weber underlines that an ideal type cannot and should not be a representation of reality, but an 'abstraction' and 'accentuation' ('Steigerung';Weber 1968Weber [1904:201) of but the relevant aspects of a phenomenon. Its 'heuristical value' is guaranteed by a degree of ctionality that is high enough to differentiate between essential and non-essential aspects of the empirical phenomenon in question, but low enough as to not to render the construct implausible.…”

Trust and National Character: Japanese Sense of Trust, Cross-National and Longitudinal Surveys

“…Weber (1904-05) attributed the success of capitalism and industrialization in the West to the Protestant ethic such as diligence and punctuality, and claimed that Asian peoples were not able to develop capitalism because they lacked such ethics. For example, he disregarded the Chinese because of their Confucianism contrasted with Protestantism.…”

The agricultural basis of comparative development

“…Productivity increases may be due to changes in economic and political institutions, as emphasized by Acemoglu et al (2001Acemoglu et al ( , 2002Acemoglu et al ( , 2005 following the work of North and Thomas (1973). Culture (and religion more specifically) may be operative, as suggested by Weber (2009Weber ( [1904) and modeled by Doepke and Zilibotti (2008). Alternatively, innovations in science and technology that took hold in north-western Europe may have been the spur for development, a matter discussed in detail by Mokyr (1990) and Landes (1969).…”