Tony Lawson: Diagnoses in Modern Economics BY ERIK VAN KESTEREN intimately familiar with. In fact, it is something we cannot avoid doing as we go about our lives.
The discipline of modern economics is, according to many commentators, in an unhealthy state. Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman remarked “economics has increasingly become an arcane branch of mathematics rather than dealing with real world economic problems”. His peer, Ronald Coase, adds: “Existing economics is a theoretical system which floats in the air and which bears little relation to what happens in the real world”. Finally, in the succinct words of economic methodologist Mark Blaug: “Modern economics is sick”. What can account for this ‘illness’? Contemporary British economist and philosopher Tony Lawson has dedicated his career to diagnosing the state of the discipline (Economics and Reality, 1997; Reorienting Economics, 2003; The Nature and State of Modern Economics, 2015). Lawson contends that the fundamental problem of modern economics stems from its neglect of ontology. Now, what is ontology, and why is it relevant to economics? Ontology derives from the Greek to on, meaning ‘being’, and logos, which in this context expresses something like ‘the study of’ or ‘an account of’. So, ontology is the study of ‘being’. Put simply, ontology concerns the nature of things. While this may seem obscure, for Lawson, ontology is rather something that each one of us is
To see why, we can consider what is involved in performing an everyday task, like cleaning a window. The task of cleaning a window requires selecting the appropriate tools. In this case, we would perhaps use a simple cloth, rather than,
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