In his column last week, David Brooks called for economics to become more of an art than a science. Brooks asserted that the recent economic crisis was landmark – that it provided the first real challenge to an increasingly mathematically-driven field since its inception in the 1770s. It’s an interesting article, but its thrust is summarized here:
Economics achieved coherence as a science by amputating most of human nature. Now economists are starting with those parts of emotional life that they can count and model (the activities that make them economists). But once they’re in this terrain, they’ll surely find that the processes that make up the inner life are not amenable to the methodologies of social science. The moral and social yearnings of fully realized human beings are not reducible to universal laws and cannot be studied like physics.
Once this is accepted, economics would again become a subsection of history and moral philosophy. It will be a powerful language for analyzing certain sorts of activity. Economists will be able to describe how some people acted in some specific contexts. They will be able to draw out some suggestive lessons to keep in mind while thinking about other people and other contexts — just as historians, psychologists and novelists do.
On the whole, Brooks makes a rare solid point. Economics has achieved a singular arrogance founded on a reliance on fancy models. The discipline needs to show some humility and, as Brooks says, realize that it cannot be disaggregated from the welfare and opinions of individual people. That is, it needs to recognize its limits and acknowledge that, because of the presence of human actors, some predictive and evaluative elements will always remain subjective and inherently uncertain.
Economics is much more closely tied with social values than is a science like physics or chemistry and because of this, it is often filtered through a politically motivated lens. Economists have a responsibility to be upfront about the normative goals and assumptions inherent to the field. That is, they must begin to see themselves as artists - or even as Keynes would have it, as tradesmen like dentists – who use their discipline as a tool to create subjectively “beautiful” or useful ends.
Brooks’ article represents a timely intersection of popular anti-bank rhetoric and a more entrenched Reaganist “back-to-basics” vision of economics. Brooks’ plea for the field to return to the heady days of Adam Smith and David Ricardo – simpler days when morality was more of a watchword – seems to come straight out of the ‘80s. But in calling for this straight-forward regression, Brooks ignores the fundamentally sinusoidal nature of academic economics.
Brooks, for instance, would have us forget the prominent German Historical School of the 19th century, which reacted strongly against the promises and premises of mathematical, predictive economics. He perhaps would even have us gloss over the Great Depression – an event which led to a rejection of reductive neo-Classicism for Keynesianism – a system that both acknowledged an inherent uncertainty and tried to incorporate human psychology into its diagnoses.
In short, the humble sort of economic system that Brooks imagines for our future is much more like post-war Keynesianism than the foundational work of people like Ricardo. The reevaluation of the economic discipline, then, is not a rejection of 200 plus years of steady intellectual growth, but instead merely a turning point in the cycle of economic thought.
