A Disquieting Suggestion

An exercise in polemic on the state of economics

Disclaimer: This blog does not reflect my settled opinion. It is the product of a certain mood - one which can be easily recreated by reading two intelligent economists from the left and the right, and following both as they take the same set of facts and arrive at violently opposed conclusions.

There are few true modern classics in the field of ethics. One of them, surely, is Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981), a study in the history of moral theory which played a large part in the 20th century revival of Aristotelian moral thought. The book opens with the following description of an 'imaginary possible world':

'Imagine that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe. A series of environmental disasters are blamed by the general public on the scientists. Widespread riots occur, laboratories are burnt down, physicists are killed, books and instruments are destroyed. Finally, a Know-Nothing political movement takes power and successfully abolishes science teaching in schools and universities, imprisoning and executing the remaining scientists. Later still there is a reaction against this destructive movement and enlightened people seek to revive science, although they have largely forgotten what it was. But all that they possess are fragments: a knowledge of experiments detached from any knowledge of the theoretical context which gave them significance; parts of theories unrelated either to the other bits and pieces of theory which they possess or to experiment; instruments whose use has been forgotten; half-chapters from books, single pages from articles, not always fully legible because torn and charred. None the less all these fragments are re-embodied in a set of practices which go under the revived name of physics, chemistry and biology […] In such a culture men would use expressions such as 'neutrino', 'mass', 'specific gravity', 'atomic weight' in systematic and often interrelated ways which would resemble in lesser or greater degrees the ways in which such expressions had been used in earlier times before scientific knowledge had been so largely lost. But many of the beliefs presupposed by the use of these expressions would have been lost and there would appear to be an element of arbitrariness and even choice in their application which would appear surprising to us […]'

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, Bloomsbury (2013), p. 2

MacIntyre goes on to liken this world – where the language of the natural sciences has fallen into a 'grave state of disorder' – to the contemporary world of moral philosophy. And from there he launches on to a ferocious but meticulously argued polemic against the various moral 'isms' and for a return to virtue ethics as the only well-ordered moral tradition left standing. It is a great book, even if it fails to persuade most readers.

Some thoughts…

First, this bit of philosophical science-fiction does not seem as entirely improbable as we would like it to be. For those who are familiar with the works of Walter M Miller Jr this is also basically the plot of A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), only without the global 'flame deluge' of total nuclear war. A reader in 2025, who has seen hypersonic missiles falling from the sky at ten times the speed of sound, does not have to take a massive leap of the imagination to get to Macintyre's world.

Second, MacIntyre was using this counter-factual to show up what a 'gravely disordered' system of knowledge might look like. He proceeds by way of counter-factual not because such systems are rare, but because they can be hard to discern, especially when you are ‘inside’ them. Such a system would, he tells us, involve a sort of bric-a-brac of random bits of previously living but now largely disintegrated theoretical machinery, thrown together and lacking any real systematic coherence or intelligibility. The old and redundant bits of theory would be mixed with the new and lively, only we would not be able to tell the two apart. As MacIntyre says later on in the book, the normal mode of discourse in such a system is 'disagreement' and the 'most striking feature of the debates in which these disagreements are expressed is their interminable order'.

I will now turn polemical myself and say that a philosophically-minded economist reading MacIntyre's 'disquieting suggestion' may be forgiven for thinking he was talking about his own field. Like the 'science' of the Leibowitz-MacIntyre world, in economics we see 'parts of theories unrelated either to the other bits and pieces of theory which they possess or to experiment' and words used in 'systematic and often interrelated ways' but which lose and gain new meanings quite without anyone noticing. Arguments abound, but there is no established way of deciding between the claims (c.f. the Cambridge capital debates of the 50s and 60s). Models are made, models are used, but like Von Neumann's elephant​, there is an unvoiced suspicion that the parameters can be monkeyed with to produce any result that would be useful or convenient because the underlying theory displays an inescapable 'element of arbitrariness'. Perhaps this is just a picture of economics at its worst, or it may be completely unfair gibberish. The best attempt to do this sort of imaginary world-making for economics was done by Axel Leijonhufvud in his Life Among the Econ, which also has the merit of being absolutely hilarious (even if there are a lot of in-jokes).

Let’s suppose it is not unfair gibberish for a moment.

What would be needed to get the system out of its state of 'grave disorder'? I have two ideas. The first would be to do more philosophy, which is to say, more first and second order analysis of the conceptual stuff out of which economic theory is made. As I’ve mentioned in a previous blog, economists have a strong prejudice against philosophy so this would be bitter medicine. Where philosophical questions do arise they tend to be bundled up and labelled as ‘methodological considerations’, and these were magisterially dismissed many decades ago by Paul Samuelson as mere ‘prattle’. Little has changed since then, and there is a general belief, which crosses internal boundaries within the profession, that mathematics is enough to maintain the coherence of economics as a discipline.

The second would be to do more history, ideally with a philosophical inflection, like MacIntyre's book, at least half of which is concerned with the history of ethical ideas. We should take the following words from the physicist Pierre Duhem as a guide:

'The legitimate, sure, and fruitful method of preparing a student to receive a physical hypothesis is the historical method. To retrace the transformations through which the empirical matter accrued while the theoretical form was first sketched; to describe the long collaboration by means of which common sense and deductive logic analysed this matter and modelled that form until one was exactly adapted to the other: that is the best way, surely even the only way, to give to those studying physics a correct and clear view of the very complex and living organisation of this science'

Pierre Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, Princeton University Press (1991), p.269

I can already hear the protests - “that sounds very nice”, you will say, “but physics is not actually taught this way”. That is true, but physics students often get their history en passant. And practically every professor of physics I have ever met (and that’s a good handful) knows the history of his or her subject inside-out. Peter Medawar puts it in rather mystical but wonderfully evocative terms - ​'scientific understanding is the integral of a curve of learning; science therefore in some sense comprehends its history within itself'. This is not entirely true as an unconditional assertion; but it is certainly closer to the truth for a science like physics that seems to be confidently advancing, even if it sometimes involves revolutions and dramatic reversals. However, in a fundamentally contested and anxiously self-justifying science like economics, discovering the 'transformations' in the arguments is absolutely essential because the arguments are not over. There is little in the way of terra firma to rest on.