With apologies to [amazon_link id=”0575079932″ target=”_blank” ]Philip K Dick[/amazon_link], the title for this post is inspired by turning back to a book I read some years ago, Philip Mirowski’s [amazon_link id=”0521775264″ target=”_blank” ]Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes A Cyborg Science[/amazon_link]. This in turn was prompted by reading Mary Poovey’s [amazon_link id=”0226675335″ target=”_blank” ]Genres of the Credit Economy[/amazon_link]. She traces the turn to (excessive) abstraction and rationalism in economics to the marginal revolution of the late 19th century onward, much earlier than in Mirowski’s account. For he, by contrast, blames the development of computers and the Bourbaki mathematicians in the mid-20th century.

I remembered not liking Machine Dreams when I read it. It’s heavy-going, and for my tastes too conspiracy-theorist. Still, I semi-agreed with this point in the conclusion:

“As a historian I think it would be unconscionable not to point out that every single school of economics that has ever mustered even a sparse modicum of support and something beyond a tiny coterie of developers has done so by accessing direct inspiration from the natural sciences of their own era and, in particular, from machines. The challenge for those possessing the courage to face up to that fact is to understand the specific ways in which fastening on the computer instead of the steam engine or the mechanical clock or the telephone has reconfigured our options for the development of social theory.”

Semi-agreed because I don’t think the source of inspiration needs to be physics. Biology has been a strong inspiration for certain economists – notably Malthus and Marx – and is proving so again with the interest in epidemiology and network models. Biology returns the favour, too. Darwin was famously inspired in turn by Malthus, John Maynard Smith by game theory – and, as I wrote up here, an economic model of constrained optimisation would seem the ideal model for which neurons in our brains bring what perceptual signals to our conscious attention. In fact, the interest in behavioural psychology means there is a lot of exchange between the cognitive sciences and economics right now. As for Mirowski’s basic point, that economics will always be inspired by natural science, that for me is inherently true in the claim to be scientific, and the closer economics gets to all of the natural sciences, the stronger it will be.

[amazon_image id=”0521775264″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science[/amazon_image]