Copenhagen Business School Department Seminar Presentation

Thu, 15 May 2025 04:40:49 GMT

On May 14th 2025, I delivered a presentation on my new book to the Markets Research Group in the Department of Organization at Copenhagen Business School. The talk was entitled, 'Complexities and Controversies on the Road to Social Scientific Unification: Exploring the Pre-History of Contemporary Economics Imperialism', and it was based on some of the key analytical insights from my recent book, False Prophets of Economics Imperialism.

Abstract: Economics imperialism is a phenomenon with which many social scientists today are readily familiar. It occurs when an explanatory framework designed for teaching undergraduates the underlying principles of economic theory reappears in other social science literatures as a potential competitor for subtler forms of context-specific empirical findings. Such explanations clearly exist within very different epistemic domains, but they are often now presented by economics imperialists as if they are epistemologically interchangeable. My new book, False Prophets of Economics Imperialism, seeks to understand more about the intellectual foundations of these instances of what philosophers call scientific unification. This requires not only a history of economists’ development of their mathematical market models, but also further histories of prior developments in the fields of both physics and mathematics. Most discussions of economics imperialism today revolve mainly around normative questions: is it justifiable, yes or no? However, much more interesting insights can be revealed by thinking analytically about the complex path from the history of mathematics to the history of physics to the history of economics, all of which provide the pre-history for economics imperialism as it is practised today. The links are nothing other than extremely complicated between Lagrange’s introduction of the variational calculus, Maxwell’s equations that form the basis of quantum physics, Hilbert’s famous Paris lecture on the future of mathematics and Stigler and Becker recommending the development of a unified social science on the basis of economists’ price theory. But they reveal a series of epistemic self-doubts amongst the economists most responsible for taking forward the programme of mathematising the market model, self-doubts that usually remain hidden in plain sight. They also provide an important contrast to the bullishness of those who have promoted the agenda of economics imperialism for the social sciences as a whole.

University of Edinburgh Department Seminar Presentation

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 15:34:18 GMT

On March 18th 2025, I delivered a presentation on my new book to the International Political Economy Research Group in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. The talk was entitled, 'From Edinburgh to Chicago, Maxwell to Stigler: Reconstructing the Pre-History of Contemporary Economics Imperialism', and it was based on some of the key analytical insights from my recent book, False Prophets of Economics Imperialism. A recording was made of the presentation, and I can pass this on if you ask me for it.

Abstract: The epistemic value of hypothetical mathematical models lies in the thought experiments they permit. The Edinburgh alumnus James Clerk Maxwell has acquired legendary status in the world of physics for the way in which he used Lagrangian functions to unify the explanations of electricity, magnetism and light under the same system of fundamental equations. This occurred long before experiments in the 1880s showed that there was causal content to match the explanatory content. The Chicago alumnus George Stigler was the first of many economists since the 1980s to make an analogous claim that every aspect of social life could be explained in the same way using price-theoretical equations that were already commonplace within economics. Stigler’s programme of scientific unification, though, has fared markedly less well than Maxwell’s. It has faced challenge and contestation at every turn, and the scepticism of the social scientific community shows no signs of abating, however much the advocates of economics imperialism turn up the volume. My multidimensional pre-history of the contemporary economics imperialism phenomenon shows why the original claims were never as strong as they were made out to be. There is still epistemic merit to be found in even the most abstract of mathematical market models, because it forces us to place that particular way of thinking into dialogue with others that require models to display greater affinity to the world as it might actually be experienced. Maxwell benefited from others posthumously closing the gap between the two through successful observation-based experimentation, but those who have followed Stigler have muddied the waters by acting as if the solution to a system of equations can substitute directly for context-sensitive empirical findings. The book’s excursions into the history of science, the history of scientific modelling, the history of mathematics and the history of metamathematics reveal the shaky foundations on which this supposed equivalence is based. Moreover, detailed study of the history of economic thought shows that those economists whose work is most synonymous with deepening the mathematical features of abstract market models almost always knew as much. The pre-history of economics imperialism was full of moments when mathematical pioneers in economics stopped themselves from following the path that later generations of economics imperialists chose to follow.ink opens

Rethinking the Market » Activities and Outputs (tag [James Clerk Maxwell])

Copenhagen Business School Department Seminar Presentation

University of Edinburgh Department Seminar Presentation