real-world economics review, issue no. 100 subscribe for free
Issue no. 5, 2001
Real Science Is Pluralist Edward Fullbrook
Copyright: Edward Fullbrook, 2001
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Introduction Fifty years from now, when historians of ideas write about how economics turned away from scientism a d a d c e ce, e a de f e a e e a e a ea a ce f R be S article in Le Monde (3 Jan. 2001). Most economists living today grew up with the idea, even if not always agreeing with it, that there is and should be a master theory, neoclassicalism. But the idea of a nation, the United States, claiming mastery over the theoretical core is not one that often has been publicly c a ed. Ye a e ed e age a ea f e e a ag a fS a c e, a d whose aftershocks are, as I write, awakening economists from their slumbers. Nevertheless, those future historians will be wrong if they hold Solow to account for more than being a a e age g e ed e g ace a e g e. S a ce e e manifests in nationalistic form an ideology that has choked the social sciences, economics in particular, for as long as most of us can remember. Let me try to explain. Recently I wrote a paper concerned with identifying within a theoretical context a range of economic phenomena. It focuses on categories of market behaviour which, on the one hand, are well-known, commonplace, completely respectable and increasingly dominant, but which, on the other hand, are excluded from the theoretical core of mainstream economics. One cannot easily imagine a similar dysfunctional state persisting in a natural science -- such as, for example, physics refusing to consider micro-physical phenomena because they don't observe the metaphysics of gravitational theory. But of course such states of affairs in economics are the rule rather than the exception, and it is worth considering why this is so. I am going to filter this brief inquiry though a short passage by Roy Bhaskar. In The Possibility of Naturalism (1979), he writes as follows; one has in science a three-phase schema of development in which, in a continuing dialectic, science identifies a phenomenon (or range of phenomena) [that's phase one], constructs explanations for it and empirically tests its explanations [that's two], leading to the identification of the generative mechanism at work [that's three], which now becomes the phenomenon to be explained, and so on. [and that's the dialectic] [p. 12] My view is that, with one notable exception, this dialectic largely failed to function in 20th-century economics, and that this breakdown resulted from the discipline's refusal to enter into Bhaskar's phase one.
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