Feb 12, 2018 08:59 PM
https://aeon.co/ideas/few-things-are-as-...ysics-envy
EXCERPT: Two questions: is it good or bad that professional athletes earn 400 times what nurses do, and is string theory a dead end? Each question goes to the heart of its discipline. Yet while you probably answered the first, you’d hold an opinion on the prospects of string theory only if you’ve studied physics.
That annoys economists, who wonder why everyone feels free to join economic debates instead of leaving them to the experts, as they do with physics or medicine. What economists don’t usually admit is that, on a range of topics they examine, they often had an answer to the question before they began their studies. Scientists are supposed to reach their conclusions after doing research and weighing the evidence but, in economics, conclusions can come first, with economists gravitating towards a thesis that fits their moral worldview.
That shouldn’t surprise us. Economics has always been an ethical and social exercise, its purpose being to produce the rules by which a community organises its production. It’s not accidental that Adam Smith, whose work The Wealth of Nations (1776) is often seen as the founding text of economics, was a moral philosopher. Yet ever after, it was the holy grail of economists to make their art into a science, using it to uncover the codes supposedly buried in their heart of human existence. They experimented with mathematics and pondered Charles Darwin’s revolution in biology, but it would be the late 19th century before economics finally found a model for itself. It found it in physics.
[...] Unlike in physics, there are no universal and immutable laws of economics. You can’t will gravity out of existence. But as the recurrence of speculative bubbles shows, you can unleash ‘animal spirits’ so that human behaviour and prices themselves defy economic gravity. Change the social context – in economic parlance, change the incentive structure – and people will alter their behaviour to adapt to the new framework.
That’s something that ‘physics envy’ can’t capture – that the social nature of human beings makes any laws of behaviour tentative and contextual. In fact, the very term ‘social science’ is probably best seen as an oxymoron. In the early years of the neoclassical revival, in the 1970s, the Nobel laureate Wassily Leontief warned against the drift that had begun in economics towards what was subsequently called ‘physics envy’. Noting that human data differed from that in the natural sciences by its fluid nature, Leontief said that economists would do better to spend less time perfecting their mathematics, and more time getting down and dirty with their data.
However, he also acknowledged his warning would likely fall on deaf ears. The apogee of economic ‘scientism’ came in the 1990s...
MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/few-things-are-as-...ysics-envy
EXCERPT: Two questions: is it good or bad that professional athletes earn 400 times what nurses do, and is string theory a dead end? Each question goes to the heart of its discipline. Yet while you probably answered the first, you’d hold an opinion on the prospects of string theory only if you’ve studied physics.
That annoys economists, who wonder why everyone feels free to join economic debates instead of leaving them to the experts, as they do with physics or medicine. What economists don’t usually admit is that, on a range of topics they examine, they often had an answer to the question before they began their studies. Scientists are supposed to reach their conclusions after doing research and weighing the evidence but, in economics, conclusions can come first, with economists gravitating towards a thesis that fits their moral worldview.
That shouldn’t surprise us. Economics has always been an ethical and social exercise, its purpose being to produce the rules by which a community organises its production. It’s not accidental that Adam Smith, whose work The Wealth of Nations (1776) is often seen as the founding text of economics, was a moral philosopher. Yet ever after, it was the holy grail of economists to make their art into a science, using it to uncover the codes supposedly buried in their heart of human existence. They experimented with mathematics and pondered Charles Darwin’s revolution in biology, but it would be the late 19th century before economics finally found a model for itself. It found it in physics.
[...] Unlike in physics, there are no universal and immutable laws of economics. You can’t will gravity out of existence. But as the recurrence of speculative bubbles shows, you can unleash ‘animal spirits’ so that human behaviour and prices themselves defy economic gravity. Change the social context – in economic parlance, change the incentive structure – and people will alter their behaviour to adapt to the new framework.
That’s something that ‘physics envy’ can’t capture – that the social nature of human beings makes any laws of behaviour tentative and contextual. In fact, the very term ‘social science’ is probably best seen as an oxymoron. In the early years of the neoclassical revival, in the 1970s, the Nobel laureate Wassily Leontief warned against the drift that had begun in economics towards what was subsequently called ‘physics envy’. Noting that human data differed from that in the natural sciences by its fluid nature, Leontief said that economists would do better to spend less time perfecting their mathematics, and more time getting down and dirty with their data.
However, he also acknowledged his warning would likely fall on deaf ears. The apogee of economic ‘scientism’ came in the 1990s...
MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/few-things-are-as-...ysics-envy