Economics and the Philosophy of Science
 

Economics is proud of its scientific status, upon which it relies for its authority. The effort to show that economics is really scientific, and more scientific than the other social sciences, goes back at least sixty years.  Because it is supposedly scientific, it is claimed that economics is the best guide to policy and immune to criticism from non-economists (or even from economists who don't understand the math). Here's Edward Lazear:

Redman's topic is economics' use of philosophy of science to justify its scientific claims. This began with Friedman's more or less Popperian claim (still maintained by Lazear) that economics is predictive and falsifiable (pp. 116-117), and ultimately ended with the Lakatosian enforcement of arbitrarily-selected, unfalsifiable methodological principles and the Quinean rejection of the possibility of falsification (pp. 143-9). Since predictivity was also abandoned somewhere along the way, naive readers such as myself are left wondering how much scientificity actually remains.

Redman mentions two periods of political repression (pp. 155-8): the marginalization of the reformist school of Richard Ely and his students, and the well-known suppressions of the McCarthy era, during which economists were strongly encouraged to avoid political controversy and concentrate on mathematic refinements. She also cites the Nobelist Leontieff  in her description of economics' authoritarian teaching methods: "The methods used to maintain intellectual discipline in  the country's most influential economics departments can occasionally remind me of those employed by the Marines to maintain discipline on Parris Island". Redman herself describes  the power structure of economics  as "a non-meritocratic, undemocratic system marked by Prussian authoritarianism." (pp. 158-159; Leontieff from 1982).¹

Redman notes that, by contrast to physics, the body of generally agreed-upon economics is not large -- and not only that, economists from different schools do not even read one another's work, so that there can be little dialogue or debate between economists who hold opposing views, and still less the kind of confrontation between opposing theories that might lead to a unified view (pp. 146-9) .

The following statement by Charles Schulze (p. 155) also is grist for my mill: "The one great thing we [economists] have going for us is the premise that individuals act rationally in trying to satisfy their preferences. That is an incredibly powerful tool because you can model it." What this tells me is that the rational individual (which I have discussed elsewhere) has primarily been favored by economics primarily because it provides a usable element of an intimidating mathematical theory. The fact that this concept is either empty (as Hodgson says) or unrealistic is unimportant; the rational individual is someone who can be plugged into formulae, which in turn can be manipulated using the most sophisticated mathematic methods.

My own belief that economists are primarily very bright, well-informed advocates (rather than scientists) is expressed by Don Patinkin (p. 133): "What generates in me a great deal of skepticism about the state of our discipline is the high positive correlation between the policy views of a researcher (or what is worse, his research director) and his empirical findings." (It's clear in context that Patinkin meant that the empirical findings agreed with pre-existing policy views, and not the other way around).

My task with economics is to disentangle the actual economic knowledge from the scientistic mystification and the ideological slant. Ideological slant is inevitable and not a bad thing per se, but it requires readers whose slant is different to reprocess the material according to their own slant. My real beef is the way that the scientistic mystification is used to protect the ideology, justify claims of objectivity, and deflect criticism from outsiders. 

Fullbrook on Kuhn and Bhaskar

NOTE

1. In Arjo Klamer's Conversations with Economists (Rowman and Allanheld 1984), Leonard Rapping tells how his opposition to the Vietnam War (which came after he had already made a significant contribution to economics) made him an outsider in his own department, negatively impacting his career and his family life and leading to years of depression.

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Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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