why i am (still after all) an economist

on bygones of various kinds

One of the things about the subject/science/profession-without-a-professional-standards-body of economics is that it is, by the standards of social sciences, absolutely massive.  That’s one of the ways that it adapts, survives and continues to frustratingly dominate the intellectual space; by having enough variety to absorb anything the world throws at it, and to claim that it was all in there all along.  Economists will always be able to say that it’s unfair to accuse them of ignoring things, because for any X, there will always be some economist, somewhere, studying X from an economic perspective.

This invites an interesting little intellectual parlour game – is there any single proposition which absolutely all economists would agree to?  Is there anything that is actually definitional, something that you have to believe or you’re not an economist?  It’s actually quite hard to do; certainly none of the simple propositions about markets, optimisation or scarcity are going to do, because although there’s quite a lot of uniformity in the mainstream, economics is so goddamn big that even a quite minor heterodox countercurrent is going to have quite a few people in it.

But I think there is one.

“Bygones are bygones”.  I think it has to be constitutive of what it means to be an economist that you’re only going to consider systems and models with a causal structure that respects the one-way flow of time.  History can only be brought into an economic model in the way I described a few posts ago – as a way of talking about an unobserved or unobservable property of the present system.  Economic decision making, as a style, has to flow from the current state of resources to decisions about the future.

This matters a lot.  “Because we’ve always done it this way” can’t be an economic argument, unless you can demonstrate that there’s some actual cost of retooling.  “I don’t want this to be built because it wasn’t here a hundred years ago”, could be an aesthetic or cultural argument, but it’s not an economic on unless someone’s prepared to pay to keep looking at it. 

Even quite controversial ones like “This historic crime means that these resources should be redistributed today” – there might be a lot to say about them, but they’re not part of economics. It can be contrasted to something like “the current consequences of this historic crime are that today there is an unjust distribution of resources, which needs to be addressed”. Lots of economists would still say the second one is outside their area, but lots wouldn’t, while the first is clearly impossible to deal with if you’re being a consistent economist - at the very best you’d have to say there’s a lot of hidden assumptions that would have to be fleshed out to make it look like the second.

It's a limited way of thinking, but the limitations are not all bad.  I often think it’s the main reason why, even after everything and all, I still consider myself to basically be an economist (in the sense of “a member of that particular intellectual community” as well as the more mundane one of “someone who earns money by thinking about the economy”).  It’s an optimistic, forward-looking way to be; I can accept that there are people who value the past for its own sake, but that isn’t for me.

And of course, this shades into criticisms and debates about neoliberalism (and liberalism in general).  At any given moment, there are usually about half a dozen people who did anthropology degrees hanging around bemoaning the way that the conception of human society implicit in economic reasoning is thin, incomplete and partial.  Which it is, but I don’t think economists need to be particularly defensive about this.  In many ways, the decision making beings of economic modelling are better than actual human beings. 

They don’t have age-old ancestral hatreds.  They aren’t prepared to suffer themselves in order that someone else suffers more.  They’re not racists.  (Or at least, economists can probably model such things, but not convincingly and not in a way that fits in particularly well with its normal concerns).

Homo economicus, as they say, was a friend of mine.