Ebook: Against Mechanism - Protecting Economics from Science

The curious juxtaposition of the uncertain status of physical law in the twentieth century with the imperative to “make economics a science” prompted the research collected in this volume. Six years ago I set out to try to make sense of the interplay of economics and science, which I rapidly came to understand was really the interplay between economics and physics. This was also the objective of Thorstein Veblen eighty-six years ago, as witnessed by the epigraph of this chapter.
I now have come to believe that Veblen was on the right track, as is argued in Chapter 6 below, but that various historical conditions militated against a full comprehension of the significance of the fundamental question “Why is economics not an evolutionary science?” Veblen himself was an indifferent mathematician and was not very interested in the mathematical formalisms of physics; and, as is argued below in Part I, it is impossible to understand neoclassical economics without understanding physics in its mathematical incarnation.
Hence the essays collected in this volume represent an attempt to revive what I view to be the spirit of the institutionalist economics of Thorstein Veblen, John R. Commons, and Wesley Clair Mitchell. Their project was to confront and disarm the mechanistic structure of economics that had been blithely appropriated from the physicists of the nineteenth century and turned into an orthodoxy of “scientific economics.” The major theme that resonated among their otherwise disparate writings was that they were all united “against mechanism.” Their project faltered because it failed to take into
account the actual structure and practices of physics, and because it ultimately misunderstood the dangers of trying to appropriate the legitimacy of science, as I argue in Chapter 7 below.
Contrary to popular preconceptions, I shall claim that economics needs protection from science, and especially from scientists such as Richard Feynman, or any other physicist who thinks he knows just what is needed for economists to clean up their act. Economics needs protection from the scientists in its midst, the Paul Samuelsons and the Tjalling Koopmans and all the others who took their training in the physical sciences and parlayed it into easy victories among their less technically inclined colleagues. And worst of all, economics needs protection from itself. For years economics has
enjoyed an impression of superiority over all the other “social sciences” in rigor, precision, and technical expertise. The reason it has been able to assume this mantle is that economics has consistently striven to be the nearest thing to social physics in the constellation of human knowledge. There are many rewards and pressures tied to being the paradigm of social physics in Western culture, and it would be foolish to think that the economics profession could be weaned from them rapidly or effortlessly.