I said only that Mirowski “shows in depth how Homo economicus was influenced by economists’ cooperation with the US government in the Cold War.” I was thinking of the Nash equilibrium and his formulation of mixed strategies. I’m aware that game theory goes back to Von Neumann.
Mirowski says this later work on economic rationality was influenced by the cyborg metaphor, which is why he emphasizes the role of military thinking on the economists’ models. As Lewis Mumford explained, militaries are already “megamachines”: soldiers carry out their orders as cogs in the social machine; they’re practically already cyborgs, as in thinking machines, given their social training and primitive role. Homo economicus is similarly bereft of deeper humanity.
But I’d take Mirowski’s line much further. It’s not just military thinking that’s the implicit subject of economic rationality; it’s the sociopath who’s the perfect businessman and alpha male, the dominator of human power dynamics. This is the early modern liberal businessman, for example, who spoke of the need for liberty while making use of countless slaves.
In any case, thanks for the history lesson. I never disputed your greater knowledge of economics. Unlike you, though, I haven’t been trained to miss the forest for the trees.
I’m familiar with the benefits of math. But mathematical precision isn’t a sufficient condition of a scientific enterprise. You need to be able to test your hypotheses and you need the institutions to enforce corrections, to instill skepticism and humility rather than dogmatism. Alas, economics departments certainly lack the latter institutions, and they arguably lack the ability to run genuine experiments, at least in macroeconomics. History runs the experiments, but because the results are so complex rather than stripped down in a laboratory setting, economists can avoid reckoning with falsifications of their models by ignoring the big picture and focusing on this or that aspect of the complexity.
So no, the mathematical precision in neoclassical economics isn’t good enough.
As paranoid as my criticisms may seem, I’m not advocating for an explicit conspiracy theory. I’m not saying the early modern economists set out to create a fraud. Of course, they saw themselves as pioneering scientists, exploring the economic territory with scientific means. Nevertheless, their model of the perfect rational actor was the liberal’s “individual” or “person,” who was modelled on the powerful white, rich European male. Economists’ work was thus eventually captured by the powers that be until the neoclassical program became a mainstream dogma and indeed a monopoly that shuts out competitors and turns the field into a cultish pseudoscience and a state propaganda platform. Thus, pointing to the rigour and innocence of early modern economic endeavours is of no avail. The fraud took time to emerge.
When I said, “Without state interference, the equilibrium we’d reach would consist of class war, depression, and the destruction of the biosphere,” I was thinking especially of the destruction to the biosphere. I’m aware that class war and even depression in the form of draughts long predated modernity and capitalism. So state intervention is hardly a panacea. I don’t even advocate for socialism. My sociological analysis just sticks with some elementary truths about how power corrupts, dominance hierarchies form, sociopaths can flourish, feminine and masculine values differ, and so on. These principles apply to governments and to corporations.
Where blame of neoclassical economics is warranted, though, is in the downside of capitalistic progress. That progress is indeed relatively recent, and it follows from individualism and from the free market. Previous societies were relatively stable and stagnant. Capitalist societies advance very quickly, especially in technological terms. And this progress democratizes the decadence of the upper class, turning the masses into blinkered consumers, which economic “growth” threatens the biosphere in an unprecedented fashion.
What stays the same, then, despite the progress, are our psychological limitations. In ancient theocratic societies, priesthoods developed to rationalize the dominance of the royal family. They told noble lies about a pantheon of gods whose heavenly abode reflected the social structure that kept the royal family on top. The royals were practically embodiments of the gods, so they had the divine right to rule.
And the Nazis and Soviets likewise had their pseudoscientific state rationales (eugenics and Lamarckism), which were eventually falsified by transnational science, but which propped up the regimes at the time.
What I’m positing is that neoclassical economics currently functions as the capitalistic version of this state propaganda. It legitimates capitalistic greed and sociopathy which benefits, as usual, the upper class at everyone else’s expense.
So I’m talking about deeper, naturalistic truths here, which underlie many forms of noble lies, from polytheism to Homo economicus. I aim to see through the economist’s pseudoscientific pretenses, to the underlying social functions and ruses.
