Today’s economics: one, no one and one hundred thousand

Abstract

The paper employs the sense and structure of a famous novel by the Italian writer Luigi Pirandello, One, No One and One Hundred Thousand (Uno, nessuno e centomila), of 1926, to reflect upon the recent past, current status, and possible future appearance of economics. From an open/closed system perspective, the paper explores economics in relation to other social science disciplines in the epoch of economics imperialism, when it could reclaim a unitary identity for itself, and then the potential identity crisis occurring to economics during a prolonged phase of reverse imperialisms by other social sciences. Finally, the article provides elements to imagine a possible future of pluralism for the discipline based upon recognition of its now multifaceted identity.

Keywords:

• Economics in relation to other disciplines
• economics imperialism
• reverse imperialisms
• mainstream pluralism

Jel codes:

• B41
• B59
• Y8

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 An earlier version of this paper has been presented at the 19th STOREP Conference in Viterbo (25-27 May 2022) and at the 25th ESHET Conference in Padova (9-11 June 2022). The authors are grateful to discussants Andrés Lazzarini and Nadeera Rajapakse, as well as to Richard Arena, for their stimulating comments and suggestions.

2 Readers can refer to Pepe, Wolff, and Van Godtsenhoven 2012 for the novel’s plot.

3 The history of mainstream economics is evidently characterized by a series of paradigm “breakdowns” (Davis 2006), somehow crumbling the previously unified conceptual structure of neoclassical economics. Two important illustrations of such erosion phenomena are Keynes’s methodological-in-character critique of classical theory in The General Theory (Carabelli and Cedrini 2014) and the Cambridge capital controversy of the 1050s to 1970s (Cohen and Harcourt 2003). The high degree of resilience demonstrated by orthodox theory invites reflection, although the abovementioned episodes of crisis are “internal” to the discipline, whereas our focus here is on “outside takeover” views, that see other disciplines as driving (though not unique) factors of change in economics.

4 The same analysis, to take another example, can be employed for the case of the general equilibrium theory. A fixed-point theorem, coming from outside the system of price equations, was required to guarantee that an equilibrium is possible. The system appears thus only relatively closed.

5 The system here is the ensemble of social science disciplines exclusive of economics.

6 Fine and Milonakis (2009) argue that with the evolution from political economy to (Robbins’s) economics, economics came to focus on market relations exclusively, leaving other disciplines the task of deepening the understanding of the ‘social’ and the ‘history’ from which economics had decoupled. Such dimensions were rescued in economics in the Eighties, when the information-theoretic approach and new institutional economics re-embedded the social and history into economic analysis. In Fine and Milonakis’ critical reconstruction, economics now explains social structures, institutions, culture, and ultimately the “social” as “rational, possibly collective, sometimes strategic, and often putatively path-dependent, responses to market imperfections” (2009, 9). This openness to “non-economic” dimensions appears to them as sort of “new” economics imperialism. But even without supporting this view, it is evident that economics could appear even more attractive to other social sciences.

7 See Cedrini and Dagnes 2022.

8 Unifiers tend in fact to increase the opportunity costs of searching for alternatives and make it difficult for alternative programs to compete.

9 The argument needs qualification: the history of natural science demonstrates, on one side, that even “successful” unifying frameworks have been superseded, and on the other that alternative frameworks can co-exist in applied terms.

10 The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, for instance, is dominated by US scholars or foreign scholars working in the US.

11 “America for Americans”. Afternoon speech of Theodore Roosevelt at St. Louis, May 31, 1916 http://web.archive.org/web/20140328025514/http://theodore-roosevelt.com/images/research/txtspeeches/672.pdf (accessed: September 14, 2022).

12 There is no doubt that in selecting external (other social science disciplines’) contents to appropriate, economics opts for principles, concepts and methods that can be easily domesticated, without endangering the core. Still, while being used in economics research, such contents do exert a transformative impact on the discipline, thus contributing to weaken the rigidity of the core-periphery structure of economics. Favoring pluralism, these changes appear able to progressively blur the distinction between orthodox and heterodox economics, if seen in perspective. Note that this reasoning holds also for Fine and Milonakis’ (2009) argument about the “new” imperialism of recent research programs in economics (see note 2).

Additional information

Funding

This paper was financed by the Italian Ministry of University and Research within the Programma PRIN (Progetti di ricerca di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale) 2017 (“Has economics finally become an immature science? Mapping economics at an epoch of fragmentation, by combining historical perspectives and new quantitative approaches”, 2017MPXW98). The authors gratefully acknowledge this financial support.