Objectivity in economics and the problem of the individual

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses objectivity in economics. It criticizes a closed science, ‘view from nowhere’ conception of economics and defends an open science, ‘view from somewhere’ conception of objective science. It ascribes the first conception to mainstream economics, associates it with its principle practices – reductionist modeling, formalization, limited interdisciplinarity, and value neutrality – and argues their foundation is the Homo economicus individual conception. Two problematic consequences of adopting this stance are: (i) value blindness regarding the range and complexity of human values; (ii) fatalism regarding human behavior associated with employing a tenseless representation of time. The paper contrasts the principle practices of an open science, view from science conception – complexity modeling, mixed methods, strong relationships to other disciplines, and value diversity – and argues their foundation is a socially and historically embedded economics individual conception that avoids the value blindness and fatalism problems.

KEYWORDS:

• Objectivity in science
• science practices
• Homo economicus
• value blindness
• fatalism
• science bubble

Acknowledgements

I thank Sina Badiei, Marcel Boumans, Tyler Des Roches, Wade Hands, and session participants at the INEM 2021 15th Biennial Conference for constructive comments and suggestions on a previous version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 There are important exceptions (see especially Weintraub, 2002; Giocoli, 2003; Moscati, 2018). See Hands (2001) for the early and later twentieth century history of methodology and philosophy of economics.

2 See Hansson and Grüne-Yanoff (2022) for the history of development of the preference concept in economics.

3 Models, then, are analogous to recipes in which different types of ingredients are combined according one’s explanatory goals rather than pre-given logical templates (Boumans, 1999).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John B. Davis

John B. Davis, Professor Emeritus of Economics, Marquette University, USA, and Professor Emeritus of Economics, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, is the author of Keynes's Philosophical Development (Cambridge, 1994), The Theory of the Individual in Economics (Routledge, 2003), Individuals and Identity in Economics (Cambridge, 2011), co-author with Marcel Boumans of Economic Methodology: Understanding Economics as a Science (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and co-author with Robert McMaster of Health Care Economics (Routledge, 2017). He is a former editor of the Review of Social Economy, former co-editor with Wade Hands of the Journal of Economic Methodology, and is the editor of the Routledge Advances in Social Economics book series.