PRESTOPUNDIT

Jason Soon is contemplating the relation between economics and Darwinian biology, and thinking about Paul Krugman's remarks on this matter. Let me do a little Fisking of Krugman here. Krugman is just wrong about what economics is about. Economics is not about individual behavior. Economics is about explaining something, a pattern, just like Darwinian biology is about explaining something, a special sort of pattern in our experience of the biological world (I'll reference some of my writings on this in a later post). This pattern is a social pattern. Smith had it right when he pointed us to an undesigned division of labor and social coordination of interactions which produced great riches. As Hayek points out, the "rationality hypothesis" is not essential to economics (and note well, it is twice false -- it is no hypothesis, and it doesn't define rationality).

If you pretend that Krugman is right about what economics is about, Alex Roseberg has done the hard work of showing how the maximization strategy of the "rationality hypothesis" economists and the maximization strategy of the population biologist are at base insuperably different, not the least because the economists are working within an intentional framework, while natural science is inherently non-intentional (for details see Rosenberg's Economics -- Mathematical Politics or Science of Diminishing Returns). Rosenberg is the sort of philosopher who knows the fundamentals of economics much better than most economists, and the fundamentals of Darwinian biology much better than most biologists (why? because most economists and biologists are either narrow mathemacians or they are narrowly empirically oriented -- they take for granted the background explanatory superstructure they usually think about only rather superficially. Also Roseberg is one of the smartest folks on the planet.)