On reductionist economics. Musings

Production relations, labor markets, trade networks, government policies, agents’ decision patterns are what comes to mind when I hear the word economics. As economics continues to trend away from its original subject matter, and rebrand itself as a a versatile prism able to refract any and all things human, my passion for economics is very much about the good old fashioned economy. Value production relations and the rules that govern them are the core of what my focus is as an economist, and as an economist, the tools that I have inherited from centuries of economic research allow increasingly rigorous conceptually modelling and empirical quantification. The history of economics is indeed one of amazing progress at the service of improved human welfare. It is a tradition that I am proud to belong to and that I strive to participate in.

The current moment in the history of economic thought is a peculiar one. In my work, I use concepts such as incentives, utility, otpimization, rationality, exogeneity when applicable, but I deny these concepts the primacy that neo-classical economics has given them. The theories are helpful. The praxis however has accepted these theories as uncontested assumptions pushing the discipline to claim authority over an ever expanding field of questions. This, in my view, poses epistemological and ethical concerns that I will not delve into here. Suffice it to give the example of the treatment of race in economics from the early days of the AEA to today as an “exogenous” variable, and not an endogenous production of the dynamic system itself that cannot exist outside of it.

But, there is hope …. Econ’s anthropological overreach can become an opportunity for inter or postdisciplinary research. Economic thinking can infrom many of the themes that have triggered economists’ interests from crime, to religious comittment, identity, gender, etc. But it cannot do it alone in an imperialist approach that disregards the knowledge accumulated in other disciplnary praxes and claim the sufficiency of economic priors in addressing fundemantelly non-economic topics. I hope to be able to participate in moving economics towards this postdisciplinary world, where the profession is, outwardly-curious, less overreaching, and more ambitious.