Lars P. Syll — How to reform the teaching of economics

Lars P. Syll
How to reform the teaching of economics
Alan Kirman 

My thoughts previously posted in recent comments, rearranged and edited:


In my view, economics is a failed discipline because it is too partial and needs to be incorporated into social science and integrated with biology, psychology and philosophy, in particular logic, methodology, ethics and social and political philosophy. Economists always view the world through the lens of economics, which is a myopic POV. The world is much larger.

Calling economics as presently practiced a science is silly. It is ideological through and through, making it a combination of speculative philosophy and partisan politics.

Worse, there's no penalty in the economics profession for saying and doing stupid things and acting with conflict of interest. Therefore, I would not call it a "profession" at all. It's a racket.

Without changing the power structure, no permanent change is possible in the framework of so-called capitalism. The problem is not fundamentally economic or financial, that is, related to the factors or money, but rather political, related to power. This has to be addressed politically and the entire system has to be changed to eliminate privilege, which is always ultimately power-based although the source of power may be different in different contexts. Locate the reasons for the power asymmetries leading to privilege and remove them. For example, discussion of economics independently of geopolitical and geostrategy ignores the elephant in the room with respect to the "stock," "flow." "levers," and "control knobs" of power that shape social, political and economic reality on a global scale.

Philosophically, economics is an argument between proponents of the "natural order" (social Darwinism) and humanists, which amounts to economic liberalism versus social liberalism. The so-called natural order favors power. This is addressed by rights. Rights are not natural in that they are not found in the natural world. They are legal constructs that have been imposed politically where a power structure has permitted it.

The contemporary universe of discourse replaced universes of discourses based on the Great Chain of Being at the time of the Scientific Revolution. It's only "scientific" in the sense of replacing a theological anthropomorphism with a more philosophical one based on individualism. The former was a form of holism and the latter is a form of atomism modled on the success of physical science. In science, the laws of nature replaced natural law and Nature replaced God at the apex of the hierarchy. In economics the invisible hand was modeled on 18th century Deism and Newtonian physics.

The fundamental assumption of atomism is that reality is an aggregate of elements, and analysis of the elements yields all possible knowledge of the aggregate.

Methodological individualism fails as an assumption in that it is based on ontological individualism, which in the case of humans in untrue, as amply demonstrated in the case of feral children, as Roger reminds us. In the case of feral children, the person remains at the animal level when introduced to society and is non-functional.

Mechanism also as a metaphor because it is inherently non-reflexive and static. The more appropriate metaphor is organic in that organisms are individually augmenting and declining based on internal systems and their relationships, and interactively adaptive, reflexive, and system-dependent.

The fundamental assumption of holism is that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts in that the relationships among the parts are as significant as the parts considered separately. This is called synergy.

If economics is to become a science, it needs to develop a fresh holistic approach to replace the previous one based on the Great Chain of Being.

The approach to social, political and economic reality needs to be integrated and also informed by history. It needs to become an integrated systems approach to complexity, reflexivity, and emergence that is data-based rather than introspectively developed.