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Economics and Interdisciplinarity: One Step Forward, N Steps Back?*

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Economics and Interdisciplinarity: One Step Forward, N Steps Back?* Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais 119 | 2019 Número semitemático Economics and Interdisciplinarity: One Step Forward, N Steps Back? Economia e interdisciplinaridade: um passo em frente, n passos para trás? Économie et Interdisciplinarité: un pas en avant, n pas en arrière? Ben Fine Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/rccs/9230 DOI: 10.4000/rccs.9230 ISSN: 2182-7435 Publisher Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade de Coimbra Printed version Date of publication: 1 September 2019 Number of pages: 131-148 ISSN: 0254-1106 Electronic reference Ben Fine, « Economics and Interdisciplinarity: One Step Forward, N Steps Back? », Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais [Online], 119 | 2019, Online since 06 August 2019, connection on 08 August 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/rccs/9230 ; DOI : 10.4000/rccs.9230 Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, 119, setembro 2019: 131-148 BEN FINE Economics and Interdisciplinarity: One Step Forward, N Steps Back?* Mainstream economics has become more interdisciplinary. Why is this? Does it repre‑ sent a break with its intra ‑disciplinary character? How does it relate to major points of criticism – the lack of realism and disregard for methodology and alternative schools and history of economic thought? What light does this shed on the nature of economics today? Answers are found by tracing “economics imperialism” through three phases, emphasising the “historical logic” of economics imperialism, how its initial confinement to market supply and demand created a logical framing of universal application. As a result, microeconomics (and econometrics) triumphed over other fields and methods to such an extent and with such an acceptability that its corresponding principles are now applied, however inconsistently, with those of other disciplines and fields through a process termed “suspension”. Keywords: economic alternatives; epistemological decolonization, interdisciplinarity; mainstream economics; political economy. Economics Is as Economics Does The purpose of this piece is to assess the prospects for political economy, especially in the context of interdisciplinarity. A necessary starting point for making such an assessment is the current state of mainstream eco- nomics. I approach this obliquely in the first instance, and anecdotally. I was recently invited to give a lecture at the Institute of German Historical Research in London as part of a series to mark the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, May 5th, 1818, and I sought to address the theme of Marx’s continuing influence on contemporary social science. Other talks in the series included politics, sociology, anthropology and history. I explained that the one on economics would necessarily be extremely * Based on a plenary address to the founding conference of the Portuguese Association of Political Economy, held at Lisbon, ISCTE -IUL, 25 -27 January 2018. Thanks to journal editors and referees for most helpful comments and suggestions. 132 | Ben Fine short as Marx had predominantly been excluded from mainstream eco- nomics today, since the mainstream totally dominates the discipline with little room for, let alone tolerance of, alternatives. This is so whether deriving from Marx, other classical authors, or political economy or otherwise more widely. As a result, I offered to give a lecture explaining why this was so, whether this was or was not a sign of health of the dis- mal science, and what sets economics apart as a social science in being so negligent of Marx (and others), themes to which I will return below. First, though, let me recall an earlier lecture I gave a few years ago for the Association of Social Economies, in which I suggested that the main- stream is unfit for purpose, focusing on just one of the many dimensions for which this is so, that is, its own heavy ethical content which it seeks to deny as being present in view of its putative scientific/positive content as opposed to normative content (Fine, 2013). In preparing the lecture, I undertook a simple test of the self-confidence of the discipline, compar- ing it with sociology. In the wake of the 2007/2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC), I searched the scholarly literature employing the terms “crisis of sociology” and “crisis of economics”. Sociology had a steady stream (if not a torrent) of contributions, numbering in the thousands, persisting over time and suggesting a commendable degree of self-critical examina- tion. Economics, by contrast, barely totalled 100, most of these dating to a debate from the 1930s on Schumpeter. Especially in the wake of the GFC, one has to wonder whether this lack of critical self-examination is a mark of the mainstream’s success or of its failure.1 This is indicative of one of a number of other features of the mainstream: 1) its absolute self-confidence; 2) its lack or misuse (if not abuse) of the history of economic thought; 3) its lack of engagement with alternatives; 4) its poverty of methodology; 5) its lack of realism; and 6) denial of, and so lack of attention to, normative content and issues.2 As a result, the absence of Marx from the mainstream is not a targeted exception, as much as the same is true of all major figures in the history of economic thought, and, other than opportunistically, most major figures in social science as well. Does this mean that there is no interdisciplinarity with respect to and within mainstream economics? I would suggest not at all, hardly surprising as I have been critically peddling the notion of economics imperialism, the colonisation of the subject matter of other social sciences by economics for twenty years or more now. Let me explore this in detail in order both to specify the nature 1 For an account of the “superiority” (if not the arrogance) of economists, see Fourcade et al. (2015). 2 Discussed at length in Fine (2013). Economics and Interdisciplinarity | 133 of contemporary mainstream economics, its approach to interdisciplinarity, and the potential for alternatives.3 Economics Imperialism The term economic(s) imperialism dates from the 1930s, but it only really gathers momentum after the Second World War (WWII). From there, it has gone through three phases, ones which I have called the “old”, the “new” and the “newer”. The first phase reflects the Post WWII period, the second corresponds in part to a reaction to the monetarist counter -revolution built upon the first phase (although this second phase had a dynamic and logic of its own), with the current phase just about preceding but intensified by the GFC. Analytically speaking, the logical origins of economics imperialism lie in what I have termed as its historical logic, which will require a bit of a nar- rative in the history of economic thought to specify. With the Marginalist Revolution of the 1870s, especially through Marshall rather than Jevons, Menger and Walras,4 we receive the key concepts of what I call the Technical Apparatus, TA1, which has remained persistent within mainstream econom- ics to the present day. It is the apparatus attached to utility and production functions and their application to supply and demand through the market. In what was to be termed microeconomics from the 1930s, and as the junior partner to macroeconomics that distinguished itself and became the senior branch given the pressing problems of unemployment, TA1 set itself two major problems. The first refers to the properties of supply and demand functions, given that they derive from optimising individuals, and the second addresses what I call the Technical Architecture, denoted by TA2, which gave rise to the problem of forming the aggregate economy out of those individuals coordinated through the market, otherwise known as general equilibrium, and whether it exists and is unique, stable and Pareto efficient. Forging these two problems, and TA1 and TA2 together and we get what might be designated as TA2. The first of these problems was solved in the late 1930s and the second in the 1950s, via what are known, respectively, as the Hicks-Slutsky -Samuelson 3 The main thrust of what follows is to be found in Milonakis and Fine (2009) and Fine and Milonakis (2009) but for some more recent material and reflections around other themes, see my other later contributions (Fine, 2010, 2011, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c, 2017a, 2017b and 2018; Fine and Dimakou, 2016; Fine and Milonakis, 2011), where extensive references to, and discus- sion of, the broader literature can be found. 4 Marshall’s Principles was the main microeconomic textbook until the end of the 1930s, laying out and applying the technical apparatus. General equilibrium, despite preoccupying Walras, only drew concerted attention from the mid -1930s (Marshall, 1959 [1890]). 134 | Ben Fine conditions and by Arrow and Debreu for General Equilibrium. I am less concerned with the solutions than with the process and context by and within which they occurred. I call the process an implosion – for it involved making whatever assumptions are necessary to be able to derive meaningful results, assumptions such as fixed individuals, preferences, endowments, technolo- gies, single motivation, fixed goods, etc., even technical assumptions within its own frame such as no externalities, increasing returns, concavities and imper- fect competition. These are the origins of the mainstream’s deviation from whatever we mean by realism since, whatever the extent of use of empirical information in econometrics or otherwise, it is theoretically embedded in assumptions that suit the theory rather than the evidence.5 Theoretically, we do whatever is necessary to get what we want. Indeed, this actually sets a standard method within the discipline: make whatever assumptions (and exclusions) we need for our purposes and reality will have to fit, giving rise to all sorts of problems, even on its own terms, as a result of what are known as aggregation problems, the theory of the second best, the Cambridge critique of capital theory, and so on.
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