Looking over my previous windbag posts on economics, I think I was struggling to make some very simple points. I really do see economics as an interpretive discipline, though a heavily quantitative one. Quantification and measurement instead of verbal description. Formal, mathematical theories are used to express the "stories" that make sense of social interaction. Formalisms discipline the process of narrative description, forcing clarity about both assumptions and processes. They also make it easier to maintain a common disciplinary core of "acceptable" assumptions, preventing the kind of theoretical fragmentation one sees in sociology. (Although they also greatly limit the generality of descriptions). But they are still in their own way narratives. I have very rarely heard references to "laws" in economics seminars, but the term "story" is thrown around a lot (e.g. "is the story you're telling in your model really plausible"?).
But economics has not (in the past) always seen itself as an interpretive discipline in this way, has if anything been afraid of seeming too similar to the more ad hoc and humanistic polical economy from which it emerged. One of the most damaging aspects of this fear has been a flight from questions of culture and psychology, a flight that has been harmful for a social science. Economic theory has tried hard to abstract from culture and psychology by making them purely exogenous inputs into the theory. (Either in the form of constraints on market behavior or parameters in utility functions). This has been changing over the last decade in some promising ways, especially with regard to psychology. Economists are starting to do really interesting work about how to incorporate a better understanding of cultural interaction and psychology directly into formal models. But economics still starts from a much too impoverished vision of human behavior.
I wonder if there are some commonalities between the desire to be "technical" or "scientific" that one sees in economics and some of the things Jason is posting about in philosophy. It seems to me that the internal academic war between "continental" humanism and "Anglo-American" empiricism has impacted a lot of different disciplines, even those that have not suffered any internal split. From the empiricist side, this above all appears as a flight from questions about the relationship between culture and truth. I am not talking about the absurdly sophomoric position that culture determines truth. What I am trying to get at is the way in which certain truths cannot be understood outside of the meanings assigned to those truths within a particular human culture.
There are numerous examples in economics. For a simple one, one could think about wages and equilibrium in a labor market. For a long time, economists tried to understand labor market equilibrium purely with reference to externally measurable quantities like money wages, excess labor demand, and excess supply. But efficiency wage models show that equilibrium is critically dependent on how work effort responds to wages, on how workers *interpret* their wage. Worker perceptions of wage fairness that impact the relationship between productivity and wages can completely change labor market models and make Walrasian equilibriums (once posited as an economic "law") almost irrelevant.
Perceptions about wage fairness are of course a cultural phenomenon. This does not at all mean they cannot be measured or modeled, but it does mean that they are embedded in a larger, perhaps "humanist" understanding of cultural context. I don't know philosophy well enough to know what an analogous case of cultural embedding might be, but I suspect they are out there.
Frankly, I have not seen anything that makes me think that more Derrida or Foucault is particularly necessary in either the social sciences or philosophy. But what is important in the continental tradition is not its current practicitioners but the habit of taking thinkers like Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, and Weber seriously. Again, none of these thinkers can be directly incorporated for methodological reasons if nothing else. They are out of date. But their concerns are still deeply relevant and have been ignored in many ways. (Weber is the most congenial to modern economics; to take just one example he clearly understood efficiency wages long before modern neoclassical economists did).
Marcus Stanley
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