The metalogic of economic predictions,calculations and propositions

Indeterminacy is a matter of concern in the analysis of ideal forms and this paper shows that Gödel incompleteness and undecidability directly pertain to the analysis of theoretical economic systems - specifically, that certain solution concepts such as ‘predictions of characteristics of policy outcomes guided by a social welfare function’, ‘the existence of equilibrium’, ‘the existence of welfare optima’ are subject to Gödel undecidability. This consideration brings into question the convention of a finite decision unit or economic actor, and the paper considers more-appropriate (metatheoretic) assumption structures and the implications of specifying richer information structures in microeconomics and choice theory.