In his introduction to a collection of his own work, Ronald Coase tells us:
‘Becker points out that: “what most distinguishes economics as a discipline from other disciplines in the social sciences is not its subject matter but its approach”’.
He then goes on:
‘One result of this divorce of the theory from its subject matter has been that the entities whose decisions economists are engaged in analyzing lack any substance. The consumer is not a human being but a consistent set of preferences. The firm, to an economist, as Slater has said, “is effectively defined as a cost curve and a demand curve, and the theory is simply the logic of optimal pricing and input combination”. Exchange takes place without any specification of its institutional setting. We have consumers without humanity, firms without organization, and even exchange without markets.’
All true, too true.
A philosopher would say that the chief difference between economics and the other social science is the level of abstraction. Economics is so abstract that it is difficult to connect with reality through actual behavior, in spite of the demand of conventional economics for "microfoundations" based on methodological individualism as a foundational assumption.
In conventional economics, the individual, either "representative agent" or representative firm," is an imaginary construct rather than an observable. When agents and firms are observed, they do not match the characteristics of the methodological abstractions that represent them in conventional economic models. There is no homo economicus to be found, only homo socialis. Homo Socialis is the subject of study of the social sciences.
The result of economists pursuing the "trail"of a non-existent homo economicus is something that resembles metaphysics more closely than physics, which is the opposite of what conventional economists are aiming for. The result is dogmatism rather than science.
Or maybe it is just snark hunting.
Coase and Reality
Peter Radford
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