OF PEOPLE, CURVES, AND AUTISM

We begin, as we often do, by passing along some tidbits from our mailbag.

Our editorial segment "Sketch of a Vibrant Life" (Fall 2000), written by Mary Boger to commemorate Annette Rubinstein's 90th birthday, prompted a kind letter to Annette from Justine Roberts of Mill Valley, California. After noting Dr. Rubinstein's work at the Robert Louis Stevenson School and wishing there had been more details, Roberts writes: "It was interesting to find that current-year issues of S&S are located on the "High-Use" shelves of UC-Berkeley's main Periodicals Room, along with Time and a relatively small number of other titles. On the other hand, all of this year's issues were in place, i.e., none stolen or hidden, which suggests that S&S is probably not quite at the top of the popularity list." We love to learn that SCIENCE & SOCIETY is widely available, even to non-subscribers. This may be wishful thinking, but I would like to suggest an alternative interpretation of the fact that none of our issues were stolen or hidden. Perhaps we have a more principled readership than Time! Our issues are widely read, but by students who understand that whatever use they can make of S&S' contents depends on others also having access to these ideas. (I know, I know, keep dreaming.)

Another West Coast reader, Doris Brin Walker (hailing from San Francisco), notes the reference, in "Editorial Perspectives," Summer 2000, to Marx's "proposition that humankind only sets itself problems when the conditions for their solution have come into existence." She then comments:

Marx wrote long before the atom was split. Humankind has now set itself a problem for which, nuclear physicists have concluded, there is no solution: the disposition of nuclear wastes, particularly those resulting from the production of nuclear bombs and other nuclear weapons.

This is followed by an expression of hope that S&S will open a discussion of this vital issue.

The passage from Marx is clearly intended to highlight the source of individual creativity in the accumulation of prior necessary conditions – the quiet role of many laborers and creators in the achievement of the individual work of genius. The genius is working with materials handed down from many others. This, however, most certainly does not mean that there are guarantees of a solution to every problem that arises, and our correspondent is quite correct to point this out. And her request for further discussion of the nuclear waste issue should be regarded as a call for papers!

A final item may be mentioned. In The New York Times of October 21, 2000 (B9) there appeared a brief survey on recent and not-so-recent novels about academia, by Sarah Boxer, entitled "Satire in the Ivory Tower Gets Rough." The earliest novel discussed is Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe (1952), about a literature professor who tries to protect his job by spreading the (false) rumor that he is a blacklisted Communist. For each of the novels surveyed in tabular form, there is a column for "the periodicals," and SCIENCE & SOCIETY is listed as mentioned in McCarthy's novel, along with four other journals. Unfortunately, S&S doesn't make the cut in any of the more recent novels, but again, I suggest an upbeat interpretation of this fact: the novels, as Boxer makes clear, tend to focus less and less on politics and more and more on sex, sexual harassment, and sexual perversion, as time moves forward, so it may be neither surprising nor particularly lamentable that S&S does not figure in the more recent works.

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Strolling across the new campus of Complutense University on the outskirts of Madrid, in March 1999, I was struck upon seeing this slogan, painted on a wall: "La economía es de gente, no de curvas!" ("Economics is about people, not curves!"). Anyone who has not had the pleasure of instruction in contemporary academic economics may not fully appreciate the students' sense of being tormented by "curves": diagrammatic representations of relationships among variables. (Think of intersecting supply and demand curves.) The slogan rejects abstract and quantitative theory in economics – and by extension in the human disciplines generally – in favor of study of concrete, historical social reality.

I had no idea at the time that the "people vs. curves" slogan I witnessed would turn out to be prophetic. In June 2000 a group of French students assembled a petition, published on the web, complaining about the current state of economics: its indiscriminate use of mathematics; the "repressive domination" by neoclassical theory; and the exclusion of alternative, critical approaches. The students called upon the economics profession to engage with the empirical and the concrete, to avoid "scientism," to embrace "a pluralism of approaches adapted to the complexity of economic objects and to the uncertainty surrounding most of the big economic questions," and to pursue reforms "to rescue economics from its autistic and socially irresponsible state." The petition resulted in the launching of the Post-Autistic Economics Movement, which has spread like wildfire among students in France and Spain, with growing numbers of correspondents in other countries as well. On June 21, Le Monde reported on the movement and solicited statements from leading economists worldwide. A conference to produce more detailed proposals was held in December 2000. Since then the movement has continued to grow and develop. ⁽¹⁾

The economics establishment, for the most part, has been waiting to see if the storm will pass. One noteworthy response came from Professor Robert Solow of MIT, Noble Laureate and progenitor of the "neoclassical" growth model that has recently become a staple of courses in macroeconomic theory. Writing in Le Monde, January 3, 2001, Solow called the students' position "an exaggerated reaction to this minority group [of highly mathematical theorists], or a disguised attack upon something else." Concerning the dominance of neoclassical theory, Solow characterized that theory as follows: households and firms are rational; prices and wages are flexible, so that goods and labor markets "find their equilibrium"; and competition is "almost perfect." All of this, however, Solow noted, has been called into question by neoclassical economists themselves, who now study incomplete markets, imperfect competition, rigid prices, asymmetric information, and other complexities. We can all agree, the argument goes, that the simple model is not adequate; the challenge is to find ways to go beyond it without becoming immersed in undue complexity. In short, the students – to the extent they are not engaging in irrational debate "relevant to doctrine, even ideology" – are stating what everyone already knows: that progress in science requires continuing work to clear the path from abstract and simple theory to ever more complex layers of reality. "Everyone would like to see the real needs of the students satisfied, without sacrificing necessary rigor. That can certainly be done." ⁽²⁾

Now the students' movement, with its call for pluralism and for "critical and reflective thought," is a remarkably positive development, and it is a sign of their potential that top guns like Solow have emerged to engage with them. I find, however, that an attempt to come to grips with Solow's argument also raises some questions concerning the students' position. or perhaps concerning ambiguities in the statement of that position reflecting the coalition character of the movement.

The hallmark of the Solow response, after all, is its reasonableness. We all want the same thing, he says: good applied economics, relevant to real-life problems and issues. In his subtle deprecation of "ideology," however, Solow fails to note the ideological role of his own neoclassical consensus. The religion of the "free market" is closely connected to the abstractions of rationality, competition and equilibrium as summarized by Solow. But when these abstractions are questioned, their proponents say that of course no one believes in them any more! We are concerned, they insist, with the messy world of limited information, limited competition, non-equilibrium behavior, etc. Trying to pin this down is, as one of my colleagues once put it, like "boxing with jello." Or, to cite a phrase from the philosopher Hilary Putnam, neoclassical economics "keeps a double set of books" (quoted in Vivian Walsh, Rationality, Allocation, and Reproduction, p. 6). One set is for undergraduate students, politicians and journalists: it promotes the social optimality of "perfect" competition and the "free" market. The other set is brought out whenever critics, such as the students organized in the post-autistic economics movement, try to get to the bottom of this pervasive pro-capitalist ideology.

Consider Solow's main points summarizing the neoclassical position. First, the claim that "households and firms" are rational actors reveals an unexamined assumption: the economy's fundamental units are "households and firms" – not, to go directly to the point, social classes (and individuals insofar as they act as representatives of classes). Solow invites us to join him at the frontiers of economic science in questioning the postulate of rational behavior; he does not, however, question his conception of the actors as such. Second, the assumption that "markets" are in (or close to) "equilibrium" fails to address the central claim of the only other theoretical tradition to confront this issue. "Equilibrium" is always incomplete when the core relationship determining wage rates is antagonistic; moreover, the apparent concordance of individual rational wills in the market is a surface manifestation of an underlying social reality involving domination, exploitation, and oppression. This alternative tradition, of course, is Marxism. (I cannot, of course, develop the argument fully here.) Finally, we are urged to abandon "almost perfect competition" in favor of various forms of market imperfection. Again, the study of power is recommended, but it is limited in advance to market power, ignoring the pervasive and immanent forms of social power associated with the unequal distribution of property in capitalist economies. This latter structure of power is most clearly manifest when markets are functioning well, and competition (among capitalists) is "perfect" – i.e., market power is absent.

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