Activities and Outputs
Book, False Prophets of Economics Imperialism
False Prophets of Economics Imperialism: The Limits of Mathematical Market Models
Jacket Blurb: 'This book studies the methodological revolution that has resulted in economists' mathematical market models being exported across the social sciences. The ensuing process of economics imperialism has struck fear into subject specialists worried that their disciplinary knowledge will subsequently count for less. Yet even though mathematical market models facilitate important abstract thought experiments, they are no substitute for carefully contextualized empirical investigations of real social phenomena. The two exist on completely different ontological planes, producing very different types of explanation.
In this deeply researched and wide-ranging intellectual history, Matthew Watson surveys the evolution of modern economics and its modelling methodology. With its origins in Jevons and Robbins and its culmination in Samuelson, Arrow and Debreu, he charts the escape from reality that has allowed economists' hypothetical models to speak to increasingly self-referential mathematical truths. These are shown to perform badly as social truths related to the world of directly lived experiences.
The book is a formidable analysis of the epistemic limitations of modern-day economics and marks a significant counter to its methodology's encroachment across the wider social sciences.'
Endorsements:
'The most thorough and persuasive account that exists of the origins of the cognitive authority of modern economics - and the sometimes rather tenuous claims on which that authority rests. A brilliant achievement that could really only have been written by Matthew Watson but which we can all learn from.' - Professor Colin Hay, Sciences Po, Paris
'False Prophets of Economics Imperialism is a tour de force! It challenges the economics orthodoxy with sharp interrogations, multidisciplinary insights and careful and robust analysis of the history of the dismal science and its dominance of our academic and policy worlds today. This authoritative book should be read by anyone interested in how mathematical modelling came to rule the roost in economic thinking and policymaking, and why this should not be the case.' - Professor Shirin Rai, SOAS, London
'In this brilliant book, Matthew Watson reveals how economics transformed itself into the imperialist discipline that it has become today. He charts how, as economists became increasingly preoccupied with mathematical rigour, the field changed from being a study of the real economy to 'a science of choice' ... This study demonstrates the ironic path through which economics had to make itself increasingly uneconomic in order to become the discipline that sought to treat every other field through the lens of the market.' - Professor Jacqueline Best, University of Ottawa, Ontario.
False Prophets of Economics Imperialism was included in the Alternative Summer Reading ListLink opens in a new window for 2024, as compiled by the Diversifying and Decolonising Economics group.
Book, The Market
Published by Agenda Publishing and Columbia University Press, January 2018
Back Cover Blurb: "We have become accustomed to economists and politicians talking about 'market forces' as if they are immutable laws of the universe. But what exactly is 'the market'? Originally an abstract idea from economic theory - the locus of demand and supply - it has come to inform the way we speak about our relationship to the economic system as a whole. Matthew Watson unpacks the concept to ask what does it really mean to allow ourselves to submit to market forces. And does economic theory really provide insights into the market institutions that shape our everyday life? In tackling these questions, the book provides a major contribution to a deeper appreciation of the dominant economic language of our time, challenging the idea that we can simply defer to the 'logic of the market'."
Endorsements:
"A masterpiece of erudition and concision, Matthew Watson's new book lifts the lid on a concept whose ubiquity in public discourse is matched only by its slipperiness. With immense skill, Watson explores the ways in which the idea of 'the market' has developed within the field of economics and in so doing teases out the complex relationships between academic abstraction of the market concept and the prevalence of market ideology in politics. The result is a truly impressive book that should be regarded as a vital supplement to standard economics textbooks and essential reading for anyone interested in understanding whether there are alternatives to the 'iron cage' of the market." - Professor Ben Rosamond, University of Copenhagen
"Watson has provided a history of the economic ideas that form the basis of modern economics, brilliantly explaining where many of the economic laws and concepts central to the idea of the market originated ... there are very few texts on the market that are as good as this." - Dr Huw Macartney, University of Birmingham
Foreword to Robbie Shilliam's Race and the Undeserving Poor
Title: 'Foreword', in Robbie Shilliam (2018) Race and the Undeserving Poor: From Abolition to Brexit, Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing.
Extract from text: The great merit to be found in Robbie Shilliam's book is just how clearly his voice comes across. He explores the lineage of repeated political attempts in Britain from the eighteenth century onwards to bracket off 'the deserving poor' from the broader category of 'the poor' in general. Some marker of difference must be called upon to distinguish those who do from those who do not merit political sympathy for their plight and state support to lessen their day-to-day grind of making ends meet. Shilliam shows that, often, the simple characteristic of what you look like was enough for a person of colour to be relegated from the deserving category. At other times, behaivoural traits became the means of differentiation, but assumptions relating to the propensity to display proscribed behaviour have been so frequently racialised that this symbol of exclusion has also been reduced to the issue of skin colour. Race and the Undeserving Poor demonstrates how practices of British working-class respectability have historically been inscribed with underlying images of whiteness.