Philosophy of economics

Economic philosophy provides an account of the logical processes by which the intellectual discipline of economics has been constructed.

This article adopts the philosophical standpoint of instrumentalism , and is confined to mainstream economics. It illustrates the philosophical aspects of the processes of economics by their application to a selection of aspects of current economic theory.

Explanations of the concepts referred to can be obtained via the economics index [1], and accounts of their historical development are available in the article on the history of economic thought.

The process of discovery

The process of discovery in economics usually starts with an insight as to which of the many interactions in the economic system are likely to be relevant to the matter under investigation. That is followed by the formulation and analysis of an imaginary system in which only those interactions are represented. The subject of that analysis is thus an abstraction in the literal sense of ignoring all but the chosen selection among the perceived aspects of reality. The interacting relationships that are ascribed to that imaginary system (or “model”) need not have any connection with reality: the only question with which it is concerned is how such a system would behave if it existed in reality. Answers to that question are then sought using deductive logic, sometimes assisted by mathematical analysis. At that stage, the process of discovery involves two conceptually distinct “worlds”: the model world, and the real world. In the real world, propositions can be true of false, but that distinction has no meaning in the model world, which is concerned only with the validity and consistency of its analysis.

The final stage in the process of discovery is an attempt to establish a connection between the model world and the real world by using the model’s analysis to predict the consequences of events in the real world. The process of making a scientific discovery is deemed complete if the use of the model results in better predictions than had previously been possible.

Thus the end-product of economics is the discovery of a way to make a useful estimate of the economic consequences of particular actions . But the content of economic theory is much broader than that: it also contains a variety of intermediate products that serve as tools in the process of discovery. Those intermediate products provide a framework or “filing system” that enables the economic system to be categorised and examined in an orderly way, and so enables models to be formulated . They include classifications, terminologies, and tautologies: matters that can be intellectually important without having any direct connection with reality. The distinction between those intermediate products and the end-products of economics is not always apparent, however, and confusion sometimes arises from the misleading practice of attaching the prefix “law of” to findings that do not qualify as scientific discoveries.

Microeconomic philosophy

Production

As an example, the statement that “the factors of production are land, labour and capital” is sometimes wrongly presented as an observation about the real world. In fact it is a definitional statement, amounting to no more than the proposition that everything that contributes to production, other than human activity and natural resources, are to be termed capital. The converse statement that capital (or land or labour) contributes to production is not a statement of fact but merely a tautology. In fact, economics has had little to offer by way of factual statements about production. Production processes have been grouped into categories according to the response of their outputs to the scale of their operations, and individual processes have been successfully modelled, but nothing useful has emerged that amounts to a useful factual statement about production in general. The so-called “law of diminishing returns” is a statement that certain types of production exist which, beyond some unspecified level of output, yield a successively diminishing increment of output for each further increment of an input . Other statements acknowledge that types of production also exist for which no such diminution occurs, some of which exhibit increasing returns to scale. (All three possibilities are embodied in a single equation, known as the Cobb-Douglas production function, which has been adopted as an assumption in many hundreds of economic studies. The Cobb-Douglas function is not , however, regarded as an empirically established scientific discovery: it is not claimed to be anything but a mathematically useful assumption that can be used to represent the production process in broader models of economic activity.) Other concepts that figure as diagrams and equations in the economics textbooks, such as the production-indifference function and the production possibility curve, are also intermediate products that are useful for organising thoughts and building models. They are not statements about reality such as rank as end-products of the discovery process.

Utility

The major contribution of economics to the understanding of the real economy came from its consideration of the role of people as consumers as well as producers, and in that context, its most influential concepts are “utility” and the related concept of “welfare” . Those concepts make no direct contribution to the understanding of reality, because they are exclusively terminological. Utility has been described as “ a metaphysical concept of impregnable circularity” because it is used, on the one hand, as a definition of what it is about a product that makes someone want it, and on the other hand as an explanation for the fact that someone wants it. (The term “welfare” is used synonymously, except that it refers to its effect upon the recipient.) Although it performs the valuable function of ascribing a purpose to economic activity, welfare presents pervasive conceptual difficulties that have widespread effects upon the practice of economics. The fundamental difficulty arises from the impossibility of measuring an increment to one’s personal welfare in such a way that successive increments can be added. All that can be achieved by introspection is a ranking of the marginal utility provided by different items in order of one’s personal preferences, and the only measure of the marginal utility provided by a particular item is the amount of something else that one would be willing to accept in exchange for it. A secondary difficulty that is often presented as fundamental, arises from the impossibility of knowing what goes on in someone else’s mind, which makes it theoretically impossible to compare, or to add together, the marginal utilities that different people attach to any particular item. That difficulty is tackled by practising economists for the purpose of cost/benefit analysis by the adoption of Daniel Dennett’s intentional stance, under which people’s preferences are estimated from their personal characteristics and their market behaviour. At the theoretical level, however, the difficulty has been evaded by the adoption of the concept of economic efficiency under which an action is deemed to increase the total “social welfare” of a community if it produces a welfare increase for some without reducing the welfare of any others. (The proposition that social welfare is also increased by an action if those who gain from it are able to compensate those who lose from it, remains a matter of theoretical controversy , but is generally accepted by practising economists.)

"The marginal utility of a thing to anyone diminishes with every increase in the amount of it that he already has" . Usually stated as the law of diminishing marginal utility, that is an intentional statement that is firmly based upon observation and introspection, and which is taken to be so obviously useful a generalisation as to require no empirical verification. However, it also leads to a paradox and to a question for which economics has no answer. The paradox arises from the corollary that the greatest possible social welfare of a community would be achieved by transfers which removed all differences in personal welfare. It is a paradox because the consequence of such an attempt to maximise the objective of economic activity would be to eliminate the motive for such activity. Economics has provided no answers to questions concerning the connection between total welfare and its distribution (a matter which has been examined as an ethical question by John Rawls, Robert Nozick and others).

Markets

The economist’s market is an abstraction that seeks to adapt, simplify and generalise the essential characteristics of real markets. In its idealised form, everyone is fully informed about the product, buyers experience diminishing marginal utility, suppliers experience diminishing returns, and everyone is in instant communication with everyone else. Having added the further abstraction of the Walrassian auctioneer, the result is a coherent, but completely abstract, model of the procedure of bringing supply into line with demand through the price mechanism. It does not purport to typify reality in mechanistic detail, but its outcomes are claimed to be reasonably representative of what happens in some real markets (such as efficiently organised financial markets) and it provides a useful reference point for the purpose of explaining shortages and surpluses as the consequences particular forms of “market failure”. Rather than an end-product of economic theory, the so-called “law of supply and demand” is an intermediate product that provides a fruitful way of thinking about economic activity.

Macroeconomics

The Keynesian revolution

The “Keynesian revolution” in economics also marked a stage in the development if its philosophy. Although, like his predecessors, Keynes used mainly deductive processes of discovery, his premises were not axiomatic. They were assumptions designed specifically to meet the immediate objective of explaining mass unemployment. Neither he nor his better-informed followers regarded those assumptions as being representative of all societies at all times, and he certainly recognised that there were other possibilities. He postulated a closed system for the purposes of representing the current economic system by a plausible intellectual model, but his philosophical approach included a recognition that the behaviour of any economic system is open to internal and external influences that may not be represented in any particular intellectual model. And, although the Keynesian model was not derived from any systematic statistical evidence, it was about measurable factors, such as saving ratios and disposable income. That meant that, unlike much of previous economic theorising, it became subject to Popper’s criterion of falsifiability once a reliable system of economic statistics had been established. The practice continued of generating abstract models that could never be checked against reality, such as the general equilibrium theorems of Walras and Arrow-Debrue, but most of the subsequent advances in economic knowledge were the consequence of testing hypotheses against statistical evidence.