The Downside of the Mainstream Method

Mainstream economics asserts that the actual domain can be reduced to the empirical domain so that the objective of study becomes the establishment of the relation among events. This contradicts to the practice of science that is not merely to produce a fixed relation between X and Y. Bhaskar (1976) proclaimed that the purpose of science is to locate the existing structure and causal mechanisms, and how they operate and the process thereof. Bhaskar relates that in the design of an experiment, scientists isolated unrelated mechanisms and set up many assumptions such as intrinsic closure conditions that every factor’s effect remains constant and extrinsic conditions that the factors are constantly the same ones. Empiricism disregards the existence of underlying mechanisms and sees the connection between X and Y as a universal regularity; moreover, the world is constituted and governed by those universal and regular laws. However, those assumptions can hardly justify themselves if applied to the open real world. Fixed relation required human interference to set up a closed system of constant conditions, contradicting to the object of science that is to search for general rules that do not require human intervention.

An analysis of closed system does not include the analysis beyond the assumptions. The critical question is that ‘how can the results from the analysis of closed system be applied to the real world, the open system?’ There must be certain causal mechanisms operating underneath the empirical domain, universally or semi-universally, if the event regularities derived from the closed system can be said to be ubiquitous.

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Moreover, the mainstream studies ignore time and space and the underlying mechanisms that can be specific for an event for they believe in atomism that does not take into account of these two important features. That is, for instance, a billiard ball, the atom, runs three centimeters east if receiving force from the other side. According to this school of thinking, the impact is ubiquitous in any place in the world and any time in the universe;

thus, the results of these studies can be applied to every time and space. Hence, in the salary stagnation study, the above thinking, the identified factors raised by mainstream theories, FDI, for instance, should cause salary in Taiwan to stagnate either prior to or after the year of 2000, the beginning year of our studied event. However, statistical data show that there was no salary stagnation issue in Taiwan prior to the year of 2000 despite that FDI during the period grew at a significant rate. Similarly, under the above ubiquitous reasoning, as Taiwan and South Korea had massive outbound FDI in the considered period, these two countries should have experienced salary growth stagnation during the period. Statistical evidence, however, does not verify this reasoning because the latter does not witness the problem. The inconsistencies above reveal the fact that the world is not governed by event regularities. It disapproves the mainstream exploration and implies that, during this period, there must be some undiscovered factors that are responsible for the rise of the studied event. The existence of this country-specific and transcendental, possibly, causal forces render the mainstream method inappropriate.

In short, the empirical regularities or relations between standardized variables, cannot offer opinions on anything but only empirical regularities and statistical correlations;

they cannot answer questions regarding the fundamental causes, i.e. the root causes, of an event, accordingly. The methodology of mainstream economics follows the regularity view of laws, that is, universal regularity. Universal regularity suggests the regular associations within related items. This also has to do with the covering law model in science. In covering law model, the explanandum has to be an anticipated or expected instance in the regularity law of explanana. Take a moving red billiard ball for example. The ball runs towards a direction, and a person who never observed this moving momentum can gain impressions and ideas from observing the moving ball repetitively. These sensory experience form the sense data for a person to expect or anticipate a similar event (that is, in the next moment,

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the red ball hit by the white one is about to move in a velocity toward a direction) to happen every time a red ball is hit. Thus, this person will explain why the red billiard ball moves to a direction based on the impressions and ideas gained from observing the activity of the moving billiard ball (陳思廷，2010：103-104).

From the perspective of general knowledge, people tend to explain the event of red ball moving forward by the statement that the white ball hits the red ball. Whereas, there is an uncovered assumption that a causal power is intrinsically held by the clash of both.

However, due to the fact that empiricist cannot observe the causal power, every event happened follows the three empirical conditions: first, event C (i.e., white billiard ball hits red billiard ball) is spatiotemporally contiguous to event E; second, event C is prior in time to event E; third, through the observation from many cases, the events similar to the event C is regularly followed by the events similar to the event E (陳思廷，2010：105).

However, it is never certain that one event will follow the other although they are highly related and have their respective priority in time. The empiricists rely on the historical data in the expectation of the so-called principle of uniformity². The contemporary empiricists present the covering-law model that they believe best represents the core spirit of empiricism. Based on the covering-law model, the explanan and the explanandum are in an anticipated or expected relation of derivativeness. This relation is founded on the basis of the third condition that the event similar to the event C is regularly followed by the events similar to the event E (陳思廷，2010：106). As a result, the empiricists always tend to replace the causal relation between the two events with the regularity governed by the covering law. Therefore, the main defect lies into the fact that the unobservable underlying causal power is reduced to the regularity observed as the causal relation between two related events.

2 Principle of uniformity is an assumption that the same natural laws that are applied now have always been applied in the past

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