The Art of Economics

David Brooks had an interesting piece in last week’s New York Times on the development of economics. I admittedly think that Brooks comes across much better on The News Hour than in his NYT op-eds, but this one is pretty good. He sees the recent crisis indicating a move from a naïve scientism to a much more nuanced form that could even be described as an art.

Economics achieved coherence as a science by amputating most of human nature. Now economists are starting with those parts of emotional life that they can count and model (the activities that make them economists). But once they’re in this terrain, they’ll surely find that the processes that make up the inner life are not amenable to the methodologies of social science. The moral and social yearnings of fully realized human beings are not reducible to universal laws and cannot be studied like physics.

Once this is accepted, economics would again become a subsection of history and moral philosophy. It will be a powerful language for analyzing certain sorts of activity. Economists will be able to describe how some people acted in some specific contexts. They will be able to draw out some suggestive lessons to keep in mind while thinking about other people and other contexts — just as historians, psychologists and novelists do.

Brooks is probably moving a bit too far in the other direction in suggesting that economics must shed all aspirations to scientific credibility, but the main thrust of his point is good. An effort to be “scientific” can often degenerate into narrow ideological thinking that causes more problems than it solves (think the Marxist orientation of the Soviet Union). Good science is not hubristic; it remains flexible and open-minded, learning the lessons of its empirical inquiries while remembering that it does not know everything.

I do think, though, that Brooks’ piece may even be pointing to something more profound. Perhaps, as economists “perfect” their discipline, it won’t be appropriate to call economics either a science or an art. The sharp disciplinary divisions between the arts and sciences (and their various subdisciplines) are a relatively recent development, only a century or two old. Who’s to say these distinctions will be around forever? Maybe, in the not-too-distant future, we’ll look back and see how silly and artificial our distinctions between art and science have been. Some of the disciplines we consider so vital to modern life – medicine, history, and, not least, economics – may come to be perfect examples of activities that rely equally on empiricism and inspiration, objectivity and intuition.

–Aaron Bekemeyer