Is economics a natural science?

Social Research, Summer, 2004 by Julie A. Nelson

INTRODUCTION

ROBERT HEILBRONER, IN THE FINAL CHAPTER OF THE MOST RECENT edition of The Worldly Philosophers, calls on us to develop an "economic vision [that] could become the source of an awareness of ways by which a capitalist structure can broaden its motivations, increase its flexibility, and develop its social responsibility" (1999: 320-21). Such a socially responsible capitalism, he claims, is necessary to address urgent contemporary problems, including poverty, global warming, nuclear proliferation, and corporate threats to national sovereignty. This essay will heartily endorse such a project.

In describing the place of economics in society, however, Heilbroner argues strongly against "the increasing tendency to envision economics as a science" (1999: 317). This essay questions Heilbroner's position on this point. The usefulness of this recommendation for complementing the project of developing a socially responsible capitalism depends crucially on what one understands "science" to be. An understanding of science that goes beyond the dualistic conception Heilbroner employs would be more helpful in envisioning how the discipline of economics can help address contemporary problems, and particularly those related to the natural environment.

MACHINES OR MEANINGS?

Heilbroner is correct inasmuch as he argues for rejecting the idea that economies can be modeled as mechanical and deterministic machines working according to given laws. It is, indeed, very important to challenge the economy-as-machine idea. Considerable argument against the idea that capitalism could become socially responsible is based on the idea that its direction is dictated by "laws" similar to those of mechanical physics. The "forces" of profit maximization and competition, to use the neoclassical terms, are said to inexorably drive business leaders to maximize shareholder value, no matter what the cost to worker well-being or the environment. Or the "law" of accumulation, to use the Marxist terms, is said to drive capitalist economies. The course of economies, these models imply, is thus fundamentally out of the hands of people and the institutions we create. If a capitalist economy is an inexorable machine, then the only options are to submit to it or dismantle it. I agree with Heilbroner's rejection of this metaphor. A socially responsible economics must go beyond this image and these options (Nelson, 2003b). It must challenge this mechanistic view of economies if it is to bring back in a role for human purposive and creative action.

Heilbroner goes down the wrong track, however, when he characterizes science as about uncovering the "laws" of nature and draws a dividing line between natural science and economics at the existence of human volition. Human nature and human behavior are more unpredictable and subtle than the motions of the particles of physics, he argues. Natural science deals with predictable law-abiding behavior of unconscious particles; economics deals with unpredictable social behavior of conscious humans. In drawing such a line, he draws on intellectual habits of using dualisms such as culture vs. nature, mind vs. body, human vs. animal, and freedom vs. determinism, all of which have a long history in post-Enlightenment Western thought.

Historians of science tell us that during the Enlightenment in Europe a deep shift in worldview came about. In the medieval worldview, reason and the individual were relatively unimportant: obligations to the church and feudal hierarchies came first. Time was structured with religious rituals of syncretistic origin that marked the harmony of human culture with the cycles of nature, celebrating the arrival of spring, the solstice, the harvest, and the equinox. Humans were perceived as deeply embedded in a larger divine, social, and natural order.

The Enlightenment and the rise of science brought a radically new idea: the thinking individual and the scientist could rise above and control nature. Reason, consciousness, choice, and the human individual moved to the center of the worldview, while spirituality, habitual behavior, obligation, and animal and physical nature moved to the margins. Science became identified with reason, logic, detachment (and masculinity), contrasted with what was now seen in retrospect as an old-fashioned medieval view characterized by emotion, superstition, submersion in nature (and femininity--see Harding, 1986; E. F. Keller, 1985).

The problem with a dualistic worldview, however, is that it creates gaps that are inevitably difficult to jump over or consistently bridge. If the world runs by logic and equations, why do we think we find meaning in it? If economies are deterministic machines, how can human purpose have any effect? If human bodies (including brains) obey the laws of animal nature, how is it that humans are distinguished by free minds? If the world is mechanical, how can it also be moral and valuable?

The early Enlightenment thinkers resolved this last problem by positing a divine origin for this finely ordered creation: the big machine we are all in, they claimed, carries out God's purpose and that is what makes it wonderful and meaningful. This image, however, became increasingly untenable over time as--especially after Darwin--people noticed that the study of the "clockwork" could run along just fine without recourse to a "Clockmaker." Darwinian thought, in its later developments, also complicated the Enlightenment notion of the scientist studying passive nature by raising the idea that evolution--not the insertion by the divine of a rational essence into a material body-created the very mind of the scientist.