Special thanks to Matze for pointing me to the first ever (even though humorous) example of something I have been asking and looking for for a long time: In allusion to the „Reflexive Social Psychology“ I had the pleasure to attend with Heiner Keupp in Munich I’d like to call it „Reflexive Economics“.

The idea is to, as a social scientist, be aware of the impact of one’s theorizing in the „object“ studied, and also of the fact that you are subject and object of your theories at the same time, because as a social (and in our times also unavoidably economical) being you are always also explaining your own behavior. Let’s have more of that, and more serious!

But this is a good start. The topic chosen as a humorous exercise in the article by Ariel Rubinstein titled „Freak-Freakonomics“, published in Economists’ Voice in 2006, is the hugely popular 2005 book „Freakonomics“ by Levitt and Dubner, which I partly read and (I think like Rubinstein) both enjoyed and felt a little uneasy about.

Let’s start with his definition of the problem of lacking reflexivity:

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In introducing a friend here to my „Monty Python Sings!“ collection, I realize two things: First, the range of things they ridicule is immense — religion, philosophy, medicine, sexuality, … Second, it can be quite hard to explain what Monty Python is all about, with this mixture of offense and nonsense. And this brought me back to an incidence where they (John Cleese, that is) explained that themselves — in a formidable Eulogy at Graham Chapman’s funeral. Here’s what he said towards the end:

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