Is economics a natural science?

Social Research, Summer, 2004 by Julie A. Nelson

Some thinkers have, of course, tried to get around dualistic (for example, mind vs. body, meaning vs. mechanism) thinking by attempting to jump completely to one side or the other. Thoroughly reductionist notions of science claim that the world really is all determinism and natural laws: our sense of purpose, choice, and meaning is merely an epiphenomenal illusion--a trick of nature in the service of blind evolutionary processes. All sense of wonder is denied.

Contemporary neoclassical economics, with its central image of (rather agency-free) agents who follow laws of maximization, falls, at its fundamentals, largely into this camp. Heilbroner claims that "no one actually confuses mathematics with economics" (1999: 314). However, from my standpoint--based on my experiences with mainstream economics departments and peer reviews--this is exactly the case for a good number of my colleagues. The more an economic issue--exchange rates, poverty, pollution, whatever--can be wrung out and dried, stripped of real-world content and context, drained of emotive salience, and addressed without apparent purposive intent, the more "scientific" and high-status one's research appears. The idea that high mathematical theory might sometime be applied to a real-world problem is given a sentence or two in the grant proposal or in the conclusion to a paper, but the real game is in the mathematics itself. Technique has taken precedent over content or consequences. The underlying, unstated philosophy behind this towering accumulation of mathematical modeling, of course, is that the world is such that it is amenable to such mathematical modeling: that it runs according to strict logic and laws describable by abstract functions.

In the opposite camp are romantic thinkers to whom the world is really all about spirit, poetry, aesthetics, freedom, or the like. The anti-intellectuals in this group include creationists--of whom there are an amazing number in the United States. Given a choice between what we can learn from physical anthropology and (rather medieval) religious dogma, they choose dogma. The intellectuals in the group include the poets and artists and writers who continually look for meaning (or angst about its lack) while regarding science as a rather pedestrian and unimaginative affair.

Yet, in an important way, neoclassical economics can be classified in this group, too--as profoundly romantic as well as profoundly reductionist. Defining economics as the study of rational choice, neoclassical economics treats human physical bodies, their needs, and their evolved actual psychology of thought and action as irrelevant. The notion that humans are created as rational decision-makers is, from a physical anthropology point of view, just as ludicrous as the notion that humans were created on the sixth day. The notion of humans as disembodied minds following rules of completeness, transitivity, and independence of irrelevant alternatives is romantic through and through (Kahneman, 2003).