History, Methodology and Identity for a 21st Century Social Economics

Wilfred Dolfsma, D. Wade Hands, Robert McMaster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429575365
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book seeks to advance social economic analysis, economic methodology, and the history of economic thought in the context of twenty-first-century scholarship and socio-economic concerns. Bringing together carefully selected chapters by leading scholars it examines the central contributions that John Davis has made to various areas of scholarship.

In recent decades, criticisms of mainstream economics have rekindled interest in a number of areas of scholarly inquiry that were frequently ignored by mainstream economic theory and practice during the second half of the twentieth century, including social economics, economic methodology and history of economic thought. This book contributes to a growing literature on the revival of these areas of scholarship and highlights the pivotal role that John Davis's work has played in the ongoing revival. Together, the international panel of contributors show how Davis's insights in complexity theory, identity, and stratification are key to understanding a reconfigured economic methodology. They also reveal that Davis's willingness to draw from multiple academic disciplines gives us a platform for interrogating mainstream economics and provides the basis for a humane yet scientific alternative.

This unique volume will be essential reading for advanced students and researchers across social economics, history of economic thought, economic methodology, political economy and philosophy of social science.

1 Economics for the twenty-first century

A celebration of John B. Davis’s contribution to economics

Wilfred Dolfsma, D. Wade Hands, and Robert McMaster

Introduction

John Bryan Davis has extraordinary credentials in economic thought and in promoting the idea of an economy that recognises individual dignity and flourishing. He has continued to contribute to a wide range of distinctive and complementary fields and topics, including economic theory, history of economic thought, economic methodology, ethics and economics, welfare economics and normative economics more generally, social economics, health economics, various types of heterodox economics, a wide range of policy studies, philosophy of mind and cognitive science, the theory of individual identity in economics, economic history, and reflexivity and complexity in economics. By any measure, this represents a substantial and sustained contribution to our understanding of complex socio-economic phenomena and how we should study them. In this volume, the editors and contributors endeavour to critically examine key aspects of Davis’s thinking and approach to economic and social issues.

For the purposes of this volume, the editors thought it would be useful to divide this vast array of research into a smaller and more manageable number of distinct “areas”. Many divisions were considered, and while none seemed to be perfect, we ultimately ended up with two broad categories: (1) history of economic thought and economic philosophy and (2) seeking justice: the promotion of care and capabilities, especially in the context of social economics. Both are themes that Davis has pursued for decades. The chapters generally reflect this distinction: Chapters 2 through 5 are primarily concerned with topics in the history of economic thought and economic philosophy, while Chapters 6 through 9 are primarily concerned with distinctive aspects of Davis’s investigation in the broad area of social economics. This introduction also reflects this separation, the first part discussing Davis’s work in history of economic thought and economic philosophy and the second part discussing his work in social economics and related topics. Of course, given the wide range of Davis’s contributions as well as his tendency to think holistically and in terms of complexity and co-determination, spillovers between these two categories appear throughout (both in the editors’ introduction and in the chapters themselves). Nonetheless, the basic division seems to be useful in apprehending the nature of Davis’s extensive research.

The next section provides a brief biographical outline of Davis’s career to date, listing some of his achievements and professional service. We then turn to the history of economic thought and economic philosophy, and outline the chapters in Part I of this book. The final section of the chapter examines aspects of Davis’s approach to “seeking justice: the promotion of care and capabilities” and outlines the chapters in Part II of this book.

John Bryan Davis

John Bryan Davis is a scholar of international repute for his cutting-edge and agenda setting work in the areas of economic methodology and philosophy, history of economic thought, social economics, and health economics. In particular, Davis has made significant contributions to the analysis of developments in recent economics, the philosophical approaches of Keynes and Sraffa, issues of identity in economics, capabilities, ethics and economics, and recently, stratification.

John Davis attained PhD degrees in Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana in 1983 and in Economics at Michigan State University in 1985. From 1984 to 1987, he was an assistant professor in Economics at the University of Dallas. In 1987, he commenced his thirty-year ongoing association with the Department of Economics at Milwaukee’s Marquette University. Davis was promoted to full professor in Economics in 1999, holding this post until 2017, when the university conferred on him an emeritus professorship. From 2002 to 2012, he also held the Chair in History and Methodology of Economics in the Department of Economics at the University of Amsterdam. In 2012, he was appointed emeritus professor at Amsterdam.

Over his illustrious career, John Davis has held visiting appointments at a host of European institutions, including Université de Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, University of Cambridge, Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Università di Torino, Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis, and École Normale Superieure, Cachan. He was also a British Academy Visiting Professor at the University of Aberdeen. In the United States, Davis was a visiting scholar at Duke University. Since 2002, he has served as a Fellow at the Tinbergen Institute and from 2017 as a Fellow at the Center for Global and Economic Studies at Marquette University.

From 1987 until 2005, Davis served as editor of the Review of Social Economy. Since 2005, together with Wade Hands, he has co-edited the Journal of Economic Methodology. He is also editor of the Routledge Advances in Social Economics series.

Under Davis’s editorship, the Review of Social Economy evolved to reflect a broad compass of the relationship between ethics and economics. The Review was established in the 1940s under the auspices of the Catholic Economics Association (CEA), founded by Jesuits Thomas Devine and Bernard Dempsey. The CEA evolved into the Association for Social Economics (ASE) in 1970. This represented an important acknowledgement of the appeal of analysing the interface of ethics and economics from secular and non-denominational perspectives. This was certainly a position endorsed and promoted by Davis. During his long-running guardianship of the Review, the journal’s place as an outlet for heterodox economics was firmly established and its production professionalised.

In 2005, Davis and Hands assumed the co-editorship of the Journal of Economic Methodology from the team of Mark Blaug, Roger Backhouse, Kevin Hoover, and Uskali Mäki. The journal is an important outlet for research in economic methodology and philosophy of economics, and encourages diversity and publishes work from any area of economic inquiry as long as it contains a significant epistemological or methodological component. It also encompasses various subjects from the philosophy of the natural or social sciences as well as areas of philosophy such as ethics, as long as they have a direct bearing on debates within the two primary fields of inquiry.

At the time of writing, Davis has published over twenty books and over 280 journal articles, book chapters, and reviews. Arguably, his monographs, The Theory of the Individual in Economics (2003) and Individuals and Identity in Economics (2011), confirmed Davis as one of the foremost scholars in the methodology and philosophy of economics. The European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy (EAEPE) awarded Davis the EAEPE-Myrdal Prize¹ for his 2003 work. His 2011 book has been translated into Chinese. His other books have investigated and developed theoretical, philosophical, and history of economic thought issues, such as Keynes’s Philosophical Development (1994), The Life and Economics of David Ricardo (with John Henderson; 1997), Economic Methodology: Understanding Economics as a Science (with Marcel Boumans; 2010), and Health Care Economics (with Robert McMaster; 2017). Davis also edited or co-edited a number of handbooks and companions, such as The Handbook of Economic Methodology (with Wade Hands and Uskali Mäki; 1998), The Blackwell Companion to the History of Economic Thought (with James Biddle and Warren Samuels; 2001), and The Elgar Companion to Social Economics (with Wilfred Dolfsma; 2008, second edition 2015). This latter volume received the “Outstanding Academic Title” award in 2009 from the American Library Association.

Recently, Davis has been at the forefront of debate on the evolution of mainstream (and heterodox) economics. Indeed, his contribution in this area has stimulated much discussion, as part of this volume demonstrates. He has published extensively on this important issue in Cambridge Journal of Economics, Journal of Institutional Economics, Review of Political Economy, and Revue Éthique et Économique, among others.

Davis has served numerous professional associations with distinction. For example, he held several roles in the ASE, including on programme committees, as vice president, and as president in 2008. He was also president of the History of Economics Society in 2002, vice president of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought (2010–2012), and chair of the International Network for Economic Method from 2002 until 2004. He also served on various committees of the International Association for Feminist Economics.

In his reflections of his career at Marquette University, Davis (2017a) emphasised the importance of interacting with students, in particular regarding the significance of ethics to the economy and business. Davis’s teaching interests, though, are wide-ranging. He has contributed to courses in master’s and bachelor’s programmes and at all undergraduate levels. For example, he has taught behavioural development, labour, international trade, classical political economy, complexity, health, mathematical economics, and econometrics in addition to history of economic thought, ethics, methodology, and philosophy of economics. His teaching in many fields is research-led, in that Davis’s pioneering research work is integral to the development of course curricula.

Many students have benefitted from Davis’s diligent approach to teaching. Indeed, in his reflections, Davis (2017a) states:

I was fortunate at Marquette to be in a department with many University teaching award winners. The dedication to teaching in the department was inspiring and set an example… . Teaching has a special personal value … because it is so wonderful to be involved with young people engaged in learning.

In attempting to retain and promote important writing skills, Davis innovatively developed an online ethics and economics course. The aim was to offer students opportunities to develop communication skills in a way not offered by other courses. This, Davis observed, enabled him to “get back to engaging more directly with students on their work”.

Davis also taught at the University of Amsterdam and at several summer schools provided by the ASE and the Portuguese Political Economy Association.

Davis has supervised and served on examining committees of well over a dozen PhD students from Europe (including Turkey) and North and South America. The range of subjects these students have studied reflects Davis’s expertise in a host of fields. Some of his previous students have contributed to this volume. For us, this is recognition of the high regard and deep affection in which John is held by his students, colleagues, and the wider academic community.

History of economic thought and economic philosophy

John Davis has exceptional credentials in both history of economic thought and economic philosophy.² As noted in the biographical outline, he holds PhD degrees in both Economics and Philosophy, and has served as editor of both Review of Social Economy and Journal of Economic Methodology and as the head officer of key organisations in both fields as well as talking on many other responsibilities in these and related organisations. Given both the volume and the diversity of his contributions – and the fact that his interests and concerns have evolved over time – trying to briefly summarise his position on, or his approach to, the history of economic thought and economic philosophy seems to be less informative than briefly tracing his work in these fields historically from early in his career until his most recent work. Davis has always been concerned with path-dependency and it is useful to view his own intellectual trajectory in that way as well.

Although he was always writing extensively on other topics, his work in these two fields during the 1980s focused primarily on various topics in the history of economic thought – specific issues in the work of economists such as Keynes and Ricardo – often in comparison with neoclassical theory. This said, philosophical ideas – involving both epistemology and ethics – were often an important part of these historical inquiries.

The 1990s were an extraordinarily productive period in which his research related to these two areas broadened out substantially. He expanded his writing on Keynes – including two edited volumes, a single-authored book, and a large number of papers – and continued to work on Ricardo as well as Marx and Sraffa. Davis also began his work on individual identity in economics – with papers on identity and methodology, identity in game theory, the embedded individual of heterodox economics, and several other topics – while at the same time expanding his work on ethics, value-ladenness, and normative economics. He also produced a substantial amount of research on economic methodology, including co-editing the Handbook on Economic Methodology as well as producing a number of papers concerning the relationship between economics and ideas like postmodernism, post-structuralism, and the rhetoric of science.

Although much of his work in history of economic thought and economic philosophy continued into the 2000s, the research on traditional history of economic thought decreased to some extent as he increased his work on identity and economics, with the publication of The Theory of the Individual in Economics in 2003, Individuals and Identity in Economics in 2011, and numerous journal articles and chapters. He also expanded his writing on a number of other topics like health economics, social capital, economic development, and the historiography of economics. Two major research projects that came into full bloom during the mid-2000s were his work on complexity/reflexivity in economics and his writings on the “turn” in recent economic thought (the issue of whether mainstream economics has changed significantly from the neoclassical mainstream of the second half of the twentieth century).

All in all, Davis has generated an extraordinarily prodigious scholarly output on an extremely wide range of important topics, and this only takes into account his work directly related to the history of economic thought and economic philosophy (the same will be said about social economics and related areas below). With this brief introduction to Davis’s work, we will turn to the four chapters that are most directly concerned with these topics.

In Chapter 2 (“ ‘Pets and favorites’: Keynes’s practice as investor in the stock exchange”), Maria Cristina Marcuzzo employs extensive archival material to examine Keynes’s investment philosophy with particular attention to how his investment strategies related to his views on epistemology, probability, and rational decision-making. Although it is clear that Keynes changed his baseline asset allocation over time – from a more speculative focus in the 1920s to a more long-run investment focus later – Marcuzzo argues that this was because of changes in the economy and information rather than changes in his overall investment philosophy. In particular, she discusses four key features of Keynes’s philosophy of investment that remained remarkably consistent throughout his lifetime: its flexibility, the role of informed knowledge, the recognition of the ultimate limitations of knowledge, and the difference between the mentality of investment and speculation. Although Keynes did not ignore the conventions of market sentiment, they never dominated his judgment or kept him from staying focused on long-run investment strategies. Marcuzzo concludes the chapter by pointing out how several aspects of Keynes’s investment philosophy connect up nicely with Davis’s research on Keynes: his early work on Keynes’s conception of conventions (Davis 1995) as well as his more recent work on Keynes and reflexivity (Davis 2017b).

Marcel Boumans’s “Simulation and economic methodology” (Chapter 3) examines the impact that computer simulation has had on economic methodology. He contends that the computer is having a fundamental, qualitative impact on the practice of economic science. Computers are not simply faster and more convenient computational devices for traditional testing of deductive economic theories; they have transformed scientific practice and now provide simulations, which are virtual, or computational, experiments. This is a change in practice, he argues, that will in turn change (and ought to change) economic methodology – in particular, how methodologists and philosophers of economics think about scientific explanations in economics. Boumans argues that simulations have changed the character of explanations, from traditional covering-law explanations providing answers to why questions to simulation-based explanations providing answers to what-if questions (also called how-possibly or generative explanations). Covering-law explanations are applications of universal scientific laws (one-real-world explanations), while simulations provide explanations in terms of many artificial worlds, each of which resembles the target in different ways. He argues that the validation process for such simulation-based models – often called calibration in economics – is actually a vers...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• 1 Economics for the twenty-first century: a celebration of John B. Davis’s contribution to economics
• Part I History of economic thought and economic philosophy
• Part II Seeking justice: the promotion of care and capabilities
• Index