I’ve been reading Michel Callon’s introduction to the edited volume Laws of Markets. It’s about the performativity of economics, a question that interests me (although I do struggle with the academic jargon of sociology; at least my own subject’s jargon is familiar). Callon writes: “The most interesting element is to be found in the relationship between what is to be measured and the tools used to measure it. The latter do not merely record a reality independent of themselves; they contribute powerfully to shaping, simply by measuring it, the reality that they measure.”

Laws of Markets (Sociological Review Monographs)

Needless to say, the question of how the classification and structures embedded in economic statistics shape the reality of the economy (through affecting understanding, behaviour and policy) is of keen interest to me. For instance, part of the debate about productivity is about what it measures, but also partly about what it defines. What is productivity when products play a minority role in economic activity? The Callon intro doesn’t ultimately enlighten: it seems to me to place too much weight on economics as a subject, for markets existed long before economists did. There has to be some two-way influence between reality and the attempt to make systematic a description of it. In fact, I don’t think economics is as different from some other subjects as the performativity analyses suggest. For instance, classification in biology is not completely dissimilar. I also wish other social scientists would acknowledge that economists *do* think a lot about the specifics of markets as social institutions – see, for one, John McMillan’s brilliant book Reinventing the Bazaar.

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets

Still, there is something in this territory. It’s particularly important for sustainability that the concepts and measurements economists define and gather place ‘the economy’ in nature and the physical world. To be continued…