Philosopher Karl Popper claimed that what distinguished science was that its hypotheses are constructed to be falsifiable by experiment. Physicist Wolfgang Pauli once responded, when asked about an ill-posed theory, that it was “not even wrong”.
Physicist Stanislaw Ulam once challenged Nobel economist Paul Samuelson to “name me one proposition in all of the social sciences which is both true and non-trivial.” After several years, Samuelson answered with David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage. “That it is logically true need not be argued before a mathematician; that is is not trivial is attested by the thousands of important and intelligent men who have never been able to grasp the doctrine for themselves or to believe it after it was explained to them.” This theory is the bedrock of free trade ideology. Later, James K. Galbraith stated that “free trade has attained the status of a god” and that ” … none of the world’s most successful trading regions, including Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and now mainland China, reached their current status by adopting neoliberal trading rules.” Despite these falsifications, comparative advantage lives on in elementary economic theory.
