Physics Envy: A Victorian Legacy

Reading Stanley Jevons' founding work of neoclassical economics, Theory of Political Economy, I found it redolent of that Victorian faith that not only was precise, certain, final systematization and mathematization of every field possible, but that they were necessary, and near at hand. Jevons, explicitly holding up physics as the standard, declared in his preface that

The Theory of Economy thus treated presents a close analogy to the science of Statical Mechanics, and the Laws of Exchange are found to resemble the Laws of Equilibrium of a lever as determined by the principle of virtual velocities. The nature of Wealth and Value is explained by the consideration of indefinitely small amounts of pleasure and pain, just as the Theory of Statics is made to rest upon the equality of indefinitely small amounts of energy.

And just like mechanics, he concluded that it "must be a mathematical science," and endeavored to treat it as such, lest anyone think that he was being merely poetic.1

Time has not been kind to such views. I, for one, think that it has been too unkind, going too far in the other direction, with the flourishing of postmodernist hatred of reason, knowledge, understanding and thoughtful action. The irony is compounded by the fact that, among the social sciences, it is the adherents of Jevons' faith who have been least touched by that trend. While a hundred and fifty years on mathematical economics has fallen far short of proving its validity, relevance and utility in the way mathematical physics has, the proponents of an adapted version of his views remain in control of the economics departments, such that, as they marginalize dissenters from Marxists to institutional economists, they continue to reduce the whole of economic life to microeconomic models presented in the form of formulas.

The obvious reason is that where the systematizers had few champions in the "real world" in most fields, the vision of economics Jevons presented (pointedly economics rather than political economy, with all the disquieting implications of the "political") has been attractive and convenient for those less concerned with whatever intellectual appeal the idea may have than its political implications. After all, if economics is a science, well, then what it says is just how the world works--and the math intimidates a good many people who would otherwise criticize it.

1. Building on Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian philosophy, Stanley Jevons took the position that people act according to their expectations of pleasure and pain, its intensity, duration, likelihood, proximity, looking to maximize the former and minimize the latter, and that this is reducible to discrete units--what one might call "quanta" of pleasure and pain, of utility and disutility. Such anticipations are not measurable in direct fashion, of course, for no one could know the mind of a person, but could be measured indirectly by their readiness to pay.

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