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From Economics Imperialism to Freakonomics
Is or has economics ever been the imperial social science? Could or should it ever be so? These are the central concerns of this book. It involves a critical reflection on the process of how economics became the way it is, characterised by a narrow and intolerant orthodoxy, that has, nonetheless, increasingly directed its attention to appropriating the subject matter of other social sciences through the process termed ‘economics imperialism’. In short, the book addresses the shifting boundaries between economics and the other social sciences as seen from the confines of the dismal science, with some reflection on the responses to the economic imperialists by other disciplines. Significantly, an old economics imperialism is identified of the ‘as if’ market style, most closely associated with Gary Becker, the public choice theory of James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, and cliometrics. But this has given way to a more ‘revolutionary’ form of economics imperialism based on the information-theoretic economics of George Akerlof and Joseph Stiglitz, and the new institutional economics of Ronald Coase, Oliver Williamson and Douglass North. Embracing one ‘new’ field after another, economics imperialism reaches its most extreme version in the form of ‘freakonomics’, the economic theory of everything on the basis of the shallowest principles. By way of contrast and as a guiding critical thread, a thorough review is offered of the appropriate principles underpinning political economy and its relationship to social science, and how these have been and continue to be deployed. The case is made for political economy with an interdisciplinary character, able to bridge the gap between economics and other social sciences, and draw upon and interrogate the nature of contemporary capitalism. The book is intended for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of economics and other social sciences, researchers in political economy, scholars interested in interdisciplinarity and the history of economic thought, and other social scientists. Ben Fine is Professor of Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is the author of Social Capital Versus Social Theory (2001), The World of Consumption (2002), the co-editor of Development Policy in the 21st Century (2001), and co-author of From Political Economy to Economics (2009), all published by Routledge. Dimitris Milonakis is Associate Professor and Head of the Economics Department at the University of Crete. He is the co-author of From Political Economy to Economics (2009), published by Routledge.
Economics as Social Theory Series edited by Tony Lawson University of Cambridge
Social theory is experiencing something of a revival within economics. Critical analyses of the particular nature of the subject matter of social studies and of the types of method, categories and modes of explanation that can legitimately be endorsed for the scientific study of social objects are re-emerging. Economists are again addressing such issues as the relationship between agency and structure, between economy and the rest of society, and between the enquirer and the object of enquiry. There is a renewed interest in elaborating basic categories such as causation, competition, culture, discrimination, evolution, money, need, order, organisation, power probability, process, rationality, technology, time, truth, uncertainty, value etc. The objective for this series is to facilitate this revival further. In contemporary economics the label ‘theory’ has been appropriated by a group that confines itself to largely asocial, ahistorical, mathematical ‘modelling’. Economics as Social Theory thus reclaims the ‘Theory’ label, offering a platform for alternative rigorous, but broader and more critical conceptions of theorising. Other titles in this se