There is a kind of mercantile speculation which ascribes every action to interest and considers interest as only another name for pecuniary advantage. But the boundless variety of human affections is not to be thus easily circumscribed.
This is from a sermon by Samuel Johnson. I can’t find the date, but suspect he is having an early pop at Adam Smith, whom he met only once (they didn’t hit it off). Around a hundred years later, here’s Friedrich Hayek, accepting the Nobel prize for economics.
It seems to me that this failure of the economists to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences — an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error. It is an approach which has come to be described as the ‘scientistic’ attitude — an attitude which… is decidedly unscientific… since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed.
Both men spotted a fundamental flaw of standard economics — in that it owes its seductive mathematical neatness to an insane oversimplification of human behaviour.
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in