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经济学与文化战争

Jul 20, 2020 Robert Skidelsky

伦敦—我一直批评经济学不接地气，所产生的人类行为“模型”充其量只能作作讽刺漫画，甚至可以说只是对真实世界的拙劣模仿。在我的新书《经济学有什么问题？》（What’s Wrong with Economics?）中，我指出，经济学家试图建立放之四海而皆准的定律，而一厢情愿地忽视了历史和文化的特殊性。

经济学家兼社会学家索尔斯坦·凡伯伦（Thorstein Veblen）睿智地捕捉到这一盲点。在一篇1908年的文章中，凡伯伦想象经济学家要用效用最大化解释“一群用耙子和魔法咒语在海藻和海浪间寻找贝壳的阿留申群岛岛民”的行为。

在十九世纪，经济学的实践者决定要让他们的研究与所谓的“硬科学”，特别是物理学联系起来，与历史学等“人文”学科拉开距离。经济学研究的是人如何处理生计这一普通行为。他们的野心是要构建社会的“物理学”，社会结构就像自然结构那样遵循亘古不变的定律。于是，解释行星围绕太阳运动的轨道的万有引力定律，有了它在经济学中的对等物——确保市场均衡的自利定律。

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Robert Skidelsky

Writing for PS since 2003
195 Commentaries

Robert Skidelsky, a member of the British House of Lords and Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Warwick University, was a non-executive director of the private Russian oil company PJSC Russneft from 2016 to 2021. The author of a three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes, he began his political career in the Labour party, became the Conservative Party’s spokesman for Treasury affairs in the House of Lords, and was eventually forced out of the Conservative Party for his opposition to NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999.

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dapo alani Jul 28, 2020

The idea that economics is color blind is a trick in poor taste played by Wesern academia carefully excerpting its canonical text. Adam Smith is reprinted in Books 1-3 . However it is in Book 4 that he discusses people of different colors. Though he lived in an era where the anti-slavery movement was vociferous and wrote Wealth of Nations a few years before the French abolished slavery 1794, he praised the ruthless and brutal exploitation of Black slaves in Haiti only a few years before the start of the successful insurrection. Color blind? I don't think so. But for traditional Western economists and western academia - Black lives do not matter. More detail: https://african-century.org/skidelsky-is-economics-color-blind/
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Waleed Addas Jul 26, 2020

The eminent author maybe surprised to know that there is a highly likely possibility that history and/or culture both follow ‘prescribed’ laws of nature as well but have not yet been fully understood or discovered! I personally believe so.
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Jay Kay Jul 26, 2020

"....Thus the law of gravity, which explains the orbit of the planets round the sun, found its economic counterpart in the law of self-interest, which ensures the equilibrium of markets."

Let's be clear, the point of real science is not to explain anything.

The point of real science is to construct experimentally tested abstractions that accurately predict future real world events to a useful degree.

Any fool abstraction can explain explain almost anything in retrospect. This is after all the stock-in-trade of the: The Abrahamic Religions, The Sociology Religion, The Political Correctness Religion, The Global Warming Religion, economics, stock market commentators, and purveyors of horse racing betting schemes.
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Michael Public Jul 20, 2020

Culture and economics - all of the following once had a very strong and ascendant economy, but a sick culture - leading to their demise - Egypt, Rome, the Catholic Church, the British Empire, WW2 Germany, the USSR and today, the United States of America.
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Michael Public Jul 20, 2020

In the Vietnam War, the US followed this idea in the war of attrition - leading to loss of the War. Leadership thought if they accurately measured and obsessed over enemy body counts they would win the war - but the body counts were often faked by soldiers to please superiors. The more comprehensive their body count measurement the more they convinced themselves that they were winning.
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Michael Public Jul 20, 2020

He was just early. Today, Neural Networks - which are considered universal algorithms - essentially use only the laws of physics contained in a silicon chips to predict accurately enough the economic future from models with a billion parameters - which is why nearly all trading is done by machines today.
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Prashant Kotak Jul 20, 2020

I see no problem whatsoever with Economists (or anyone else) having *personal* political opinions (however dubious) which they express as something separate from their field. What I am against is the blurring of the personal and the professional which seems to be such a feature of modern academia, and not just in the humanities but also has somehow crept into the sciences - a continuation of what happened in the past, with a half century interlude when it didn't, but now seems to be back but with a flipped political spectrum. So where someone who fitted in in terms of class, culture, race, gender, would be given covert preference for promotions, advancement, chairmanships and the like, we now have the situation where you must fit in *politically* to be offered the same, otherwise you are effectively sent to Coventry because of pressure from the activist mob (notwithstanding how fine an institution Coventry University I'm sure is). It is still an excluding of a grouping, just a different grouping. All it is is another othering (quite proud of coming up with that quip).

Eminent Physicists (for example) have always expressed political opinions, from those whose opinions our current society considers welcome (e.g. Stephen Hawking) to those whose opinions would be considered completely unacceptable (e.g. William Shockley). The thing is, notwithstanding those political opinions, in the long term they fade into insignificance and what endures is the science. Ultimately, you can't argue with a bunch of equations (unless you are one of the rare few who can come up with another bunch of equations to overthrow the older ones). Economics on the other hand, has no such grounding, so that self-alignment with the hard sciences is bogus. Economics is not deterministic and has no calculus for those aspects of itself that are not deterministic like Physics does. Perhaps it is time for someone to acknowledge that Economics is fractal, and invent (or rather discover if Economics is a true science) such a calculus.
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Bryan Atkins Jul 20, 2020

Like the Sky & Ocean, economics is broken. Its problem are vast and fundamental.
One fundament ignored by most economists is understanding code, including monetary code, in a physics, evolution & complexity context.

I challenge Robert Skidelsky or any Project Syndicate columnist to a written discussion / debate re economics, and more fundamentally, human culture's current manner of relationship, internally, and with the Geo—Eco—Bio & Tech networks.
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Prashant Kotak Jul 20, 2020

"...Another unsettled question of particular salience today is what causes the gap between rich and poor within all countries to grow..."

It is easy to point to inherited wealth etc, but let me just point out that each of the current great tech fortunes belong to people who are self-made and who mostly came from bog standard middle class backgrounds - the wealth of Zuckerberg, Musk etc is literally just a decade old, and even Gates, Ellison etc, are fortunes just three decades old. And the miracle is: everything they used to create their companies is available, right now, to you. To anyone. For free. Because as a direct example out of my profession, for anyone wanting to learn coding or any aspect of IT, there is an absolutely vast quantity of free training material out there, pdfs, websites by the bucketload, absolutely dazzling free tech: IDEs, compilers, databases and a zillion experts willing to help you (eg stackoverflow) all for free. All it requires is a laptop (~£300), a good connection (~£100) and the will (~priceless).

And while access to computers and tech infrastructure is trivially easy in the developed world, the situation is not that difficult in the developing world - anyone based in an urban setting and willing to make an effort can get access to the necessary tech as well.

Which then begs the question: why don't they?
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