> I assume that you are not familiar with Mirowski's work. He argues that
> economists unconsciously deploy physics metaphors and do so by tearing them
> out of context. Marx's value theories - just like Smith's and Ricardo's - do
> this as well. Even Marx's philosophy reeks of this stuff - see his comments
> on the conversion of quantity into quality; these sorts of statements are
> purely tautological - they assume that everything can be quantified, yet
> provide no such examples. A similar move is undertaken by neo-classical
> economics when they claim to be able to quantify human desire (theory of
> marginal utility) - both attempts are farcical and ridiculous.
Mirowski is interesting as an exercise in tracing a few metaphors in the history of economic thought, and that’s it. It’s pretty unconvincing as a thesis about the essence of neoclassical economics, as if it inherited some original sin from the metaphors a few of its founding fathers used on occasion.
Have you read Samuel Hollander’s critique in the Cambridge Journal of Economics (1989)? He points out that Mirowski himself has to exclude a few founding fathers of neoclassicism, like Menger, because they don’t fit the case, and for those he does include, like Walras, it’s an enormous stretch from the odd stray metaphor to say that new energy physics dominated their whole conception of economics:
“Mirowski’s perspective is an extraordinarily narrow one. The mere reference by writers to a physics metaphor (without even being certain that energetic is involved) suggests to him that mid-nineteenth century physics is the sole significant source of neoclassicism. And this despite his ample concessionsthat the originators of the 1870s had no idea of what the physics metaphor implied. All other considerations relating to the link between economics and science, including those relevant for the general equilibrium model, are set at naught.” [p. 469]
I think Mirowski’s thesis appeals because it allows someone who would criticise economics tout court to write as if economics depends upon an extreme scientism. But that’s a straw economics. In fact economics is self-consciously a social science and you’d be very hard pressed to find many actual economists who would argue the economic domain is like the physical, or can be studied with the methods of physics. We can debate the scientific status of social science, but it’s not nearly as easy to refute as it would be were it claiming to be the same kind of science as physics.
As for the ‘quantification of human desire’ with marginal utility theory – neoclassical economics hasn’t relied on a quantification of utility for almost a hundred years. Google ‘ordinal utility’ and ‘revealed preference’.
Mike Beggs