Abducing the Crisis

Macroeconomic crises are events marked by “broken promises” that shatter the expectations that many agents had entertained about their economic prospects and wealth positions. Crises lead to reappraisals of the views of the world upon which agents had based their expectations, plans and decisions, and to a reconsideration of theories and models on the part of analysts. A crisis triggers widespread efforts of abduction in search of new hypothesis and explanations. In this paper we will explore, in particular, the abductions that analysts may apply after a crisis and see how they reveal the prevalence of “wrong” abductions at the onset of the crisis. In order to carry out this exercise, we study the general role of abduction in economic analysis, both theoretical and practical. Economic theory generally proceeds by constructing models, that is, mental schemes based on mental experiments. They are often written in mathematical language but, apart from their formal expression, they use metaphors, analogies and pieces of intuition to motivate their assumptions and to give support to their conclusions. We try to capture all these elements in a formal scheme and apply the ensuing model of abduction to the analysis of macroeconomic crises.