G. Harrison, & D. Ross,  The Gambling Animal, London: Profile, 2025

According to its authors, The Gambling Animal (TGA) is a natural history of risk management, written by two economists. Risk is thus predictably defined, from an economic point of view, as “the entire range of uncertain possible outcomes associated with an action or circumstance” (12). Perhaps less predictable is that Harrison and Ross appraise risk management mostly “at the scale of the general environment” (8), i.e., they analyse how two species “manage” the risks their members share in an ecological niche in which they need to survive. These two species are humans and elephants. The natural history TGA presents is a comparative analysis of how humans and elephants have managed their environmental risks (e.g., climate change) with outstanding success for the former, so far, and less success for the latter. Both species are highly social, highly communicative species that evolved under similar pressures and developed a comparable number of neurons for their respective size. Their biological brains “implement a close approximation to Bayesian learning” (16), allowing economist to study their choices with their standard tools and explain why humans have been comparatively so successful at environmental risk management.

At this point, some readers may be surprised at such an expansive view of what economists qua scientists can do. The answer lies elsewhere: as a disciple of Daniel Dennett, to whose memory he dedicates the book, Don Ross is not only an economist, but has made a parallel career in philosophy defending that microeconomics is about capturing real decision patterns in the world, whether the decision maker was a human or a bug — see his Economic Theory and Cognitive Science (2005). From an economic perspective, so broadly understood, the sort of brain humans and elephants developed is expensive, it requires lots of energy to maintain. Having all those extra neurons would have been an evolutionary gamble that paid off when environmental changes were too quick for any species to adapt rearranging its body structure. The rapid cooling that happened in the Neogene period (23 to 5.3 millions of years ago) gave an advantage to those expensive brains. In the Pleistocene, the forerunners of contemporary elephants and humans diverged even further, with the former would have evolved a high-fidelity memory and the latter a super-expensive brain (“a uniquely large battery of neurons in a cerebral cortex”, 158) that flourished in the then climatically volatile Rift valley. The high-fidelity memory of elephants made them very conservative with risk, because every new experience for them is a tiny increment against a steady growing sample. Hominine brains became instead capable of creating abstractions and imaginary realities, from which a distinctive style of risk management would emerge.

For this, a second building block was necessary: social norms of cooperation in small groups, which ultimately led to moral universalism via proto-market exchanges. These social norms allowed humans to jointly manage risks to a point beyond any other species’ reach. In chapter 7, we finally witness the rise of several risk management technologies: domesticated dogs, agriculture, writing and, ultimately, capitalism — the authors’ definition of technology is quite expansive, as you may have guessed. All of them bring about new risks, but competition between groups to reap their benefits will make them prosper. The eighth and final chapter is about climate change, how our species generated these risks and how it could face them:

This pattern we have observed through the whole history of our species is what we should expect to see continuing into the future. The main elements of that pattern are clear. First, we will not confront our major new risks, of which climate change is now the largest, by devolving them to individuals; new institutional structures are required. Second, the new institutions will not be deliberately built by some universal bureaucracy but will be assembled piecemeal through cultural-evolutionary processes (which, history shows, need not always unfold slowly). Third, the mechanisms by which the risk is ultimately managed will give rise to new, still more complex risks for management by our descendants. Is this a hopeful or a discouraging vision? That is a question to which there can be no objective answer. (344)

In a final coda, the authors present the experiments they are making to develop new technologies for elephant conservation, providing the grounds for an (economically coherent) ecological conservation policy.

The achievement of TGA is thus to explain the ecological dominance of our species and our struggle to contain its consequences “in terms of a single concept: risk management” (2). When I found this claim after opening the book, I could not help wondering if there was some particular epistemic merit in deriving an explanation for such a complex phenomenon in terms of just one concept, instead of many. Harrison and Ross seem to bet on the persuasive power of a coherent big picture. The risk is, of course, to deliver instead a just-so story: plausible, but impossible to test. As the authors acknowledge at several points, the topics they address refer to phenomena about which the evidence is often scarce and open to speculation. I, at least, would have appreciated a more systematic and explicit acknowledgement of the uncertainty about each step in their argument. The footnotes could have also considered alternative interpretations.

Leaving aside these formal qualms, my main objection is that Harrison and Ross are offering a general explanatory framework that, on its own, will not elucidate the actual risk managements techniques we observe in our species. The framework would help us mostly to understand how our risk management style compares with other species. But about this latter, TGA says surprisingly little. So what have we learnt?

Let me illustrate first the problem with the explanation of risk management techniques. On pp. 273-277, for instance, we find a short history of insurance, the canonical risk management technique. Yet, the account Harrison and Ross summarise here is entirely independent of the first principles laid out in TGA: surely, ecological considerations, Bayesian brains and social norms of cooperation did a lot of work to get insurance started, but the story Harrison and Ross tell about the development of insurance contract provides no particular evidence to test their central claims about how our species manages environmental risks. The story is equally compatible with many different explanatory frameworks. The same happens with the other risk management technologies presented in the book. In my view, this argumentative strategy increases the risk of TGA being a just-so story.

However, the TGA framework will surely be fruitful at the very abstract level of inter-species comparison, where the differences in brain abilities and social norms may be significant. The paradox is that, despite the recurrent invocation of elephants, TGA is mostly about humans. We learn very little about the risk management style of elephants: for instance, the authors do not say much about their experiments with them, and how those experiments support their claims. It would have been interesting, in general to learn more about what risk management in other animals could be, if only to make sense of the authors’ central point: in what sense human ecological dominance is owed to our risk management style as compared to those of other species. Among other things, because, as the authors themselves acknowledge, human ecological dominance may be transient. If somebody were to write about animal risk management in a few thousand years after our species’ extinction, would they be so focused on human skills? Perhaps two economists writing about animals and risk can’t help to be somewhat anthropocentric, but they are, nonetheless, fascinating to read.

 

{April, 2025} 

The positive economist in retrospect
 

Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman: the last conservative. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023, 578 pp.

 

Milton Friedman is perhaps best known in philosophy of science for his 1953 essay “The Methodology of Positive Economics,” in which he famously defended the view that economic theories should be assessed for the accuracy of their predictions and not the realism of their assumptions. Over the ensuing six decades, philosophers of economics and the social sciences furiously debated Friedman’s claim time and again, either on its own grounds or by connecting it to broader philosophical positions (canonically, Popper’s). Thanks to the historian J. Daniel Hammond, who extensively interviewed Friedman and explored his archive, philosophers of economics already had a decent grasp on how Friedman built his methodology (e.g., Hammond 2009). However, there are still some good reasons for a philosopher of science to plunge into Jennifer Burns’ new archivally based biography of Friedman.

For a start, it allows us to reconsider Friedman’s methodological piece from a different angle: its politics. In presenting himself as willing to recommend only those economic policies whose predictions were best supported by the evidence, Friedman cultivated an image as someone who, assuming some shared values, sought to build a political consensus on economic policies, urging the economic profession generally to predict the most likely effects of their theories and advise policymakers only on the grounds of empirically validated predictions. Through Burns’ biography, however, we learn how far from consensus-seeking Friedman was as an economist up to the publication of his 1953 piece and beyond. To be sure, economics had been a polarized discipline long before Friedman joined its rank, with the late-nineteenth-century division between classical and progressive economists giving way by the era of the Great Depression to a division between neo-classical and institutional economists, with young Friedman (born in 1912) by then a front-row spectator. The first part of Burns’s biography maps all these controversies onto the landscape of US economic policy, locating Friedman’s personal and intellectual development at each stage.

Friedman lost no time in joining the battle. Already as a graduate student, he started challenging the few existing areas of consensus among his senior colleagues. His doctoral advisors and employers at the National Bureau of Economic Research had to deal with Friedman’s research on the monopolistic practices of the American Economic Association – too hot a topic for a supposedly non-partisan economic observatory. After a protracted negotiation, Friedman got away with his claims. “There is no significant study in the field of economics whose results are not likely to be used in public controversy”, argued Friedman (92). But he also engaged in private controversies. For almost a decade, he went back and forth between academic jobs and the US Administration, taking active part in the internal politics of both, usually with polarizing effects. For instance, Friedman’s well-known fight against the Cowles Commission, masterfully dissected by Burns, was by no means a purely intellectual quarrel about their differences on how to test a model. Friedman actively chased Cowles out of Chicago, formally advising against further funding, preventing academic appointments and personally harassing some of its members. “A collective picture of Friedman was emerging,” claims Burns: “a retrograde thinker at best, a political hack at worst” (201). When he obtained the prestigious John Bates Clark medal in 1951, it was not because of his success as an apolitical consensus-builder but in spite of his reputation as a deeply political controversialist.

According to Burns, Friedman nevertheless went on to distance himself from that reputation through his collaborations with four overlooked women: Anna Schwartz, Rose Friedman (his wife), Dorothy Brady and Margaret Reid. Burns shows how many of Friedman’s masterpieces, e.g., on the monetary history of the US (Friedman and Schwartz 1963) or on the consumption function (Friedman 1957), originated in his regular exchanges with all these female economists with whom he engaged in egalitarian exchanges, at least until the point of publication, where often he claimed authorship. Burns explores the complexity of these personal dynamics, in particular in his marriage, leaving readers to reach their own conclusions.

In the second half of the book, Burns explains how the positive economist became the public intellectual between the 1960s and 1980s. First came the political essays published in his collection Capitalism and Freedom (1962), followed by his regular columns in Newsweek, and later on by his television series and book Free to Choose (1980), all of them developed with the crucial assistance of Rose Friedman. In parallel, Friedman became an advisor for politicians in the US and abroad, reaching his simultaneous apogee and nadir under Richard Nixon’s presidency. The latter part of Burns’ biography becomes, in fact, a political history of the US, tracing Friedman’s efforts to articulate a form of libertarian conservatism, with mixed success. For Burns, his anti-poverty policy, enacted via the negative income tax, had a better posterity than his compromises on the fight against segregation.

From a methodological standpoint, it is interesting to see the role Friedman’s predictive abilities played in this second half of his career. Burns illuminates Friedman’s long fight to orient the policy of the Federal Reserve according to the measures of the money supply that he and Schwartz had constructed in A Monetary History of the United States. Money-supply measures such as M2 were held to predict, most significantly, inflation – a major policy target in the turbulent 1970s. Under Nixon’s presidency, Friedman would have direct access to the chairman of the Federal Reserve, his old mentor Arthur Burns, and indirect access to Nixon through his former Chicago colleague George Shultz.

Despite their personal connection, Friedman never succeeded at persuading Arthur Burns – an institutional economist at heart – about his monetary predictions. Just as had happened a decade earlier, in the famed “battle of the radio stations” (so called because the initials of the principal combatants were AM and FM), Friedman’s predictions were not so difficult to challenge: it was enough to dispute which construct rightly measured the importance of money. Even if a monetary aggregate yielded several right predictions – as did happen to Friedman’s in the early 1970s – it could lose its predictive traction without warning. When, in the 1980s, under Paul Volcker, the Fed started to track systematically several monetary aggregates, it was unable to anticipate the effects of its own interventions, to Friedman’s perplexity. In the words of Jennifer Burns, “Slowly, painfully, Friedman would learn that monetarism was built on data from a world that no longer existed: the regulated and regimented postwar era, the land the New Deal built and inflation swept away” (397).

Friedman had rightly captured the importance of money and the role of the Fed in managing it, persuading both his fellow economists and US public opinion. However, this persuasion was not achieved through an array of successful predictions about well-defined variables, as per Friedman’s positivist stance. According to Burns, the key to Friedman’s persuasion is that his ideas “matched experience, offered new ways to tackle old problems, and predicted what would happen next” (468). Using the venerable hedgehog-or-fox dichotomy, I’d say instead that Friedman was an economist hedgehog, a thinker with one big idea from which bold predictions follow, as distinct from the eclectic foxes who put together different information sources to make more accurate forecasts. It was enough that Friedman’s predictions about inflation were broadly correct a few times, at the right moments to capture the world’s attention. Nobody seems to have cared much about the details of his predictive record, e.g., how much better the predictions from his monetary aggregates were compared with those of his competitors.

Friedman certainly offered new ways to tackle old problems; but rather than matching his audiences’ experience, he shaped it with his incessant public engagement. In this, he was perhaps more of an artist than a scientist. His engagement skills – boosted by his wife’s assistance – went well beyond the stereotype of the positive social scientist he might have wanted to be at the start of his career. In my view, philosophers of the social sciences who want to capture what Friedman was need new categories about what social scientists can and should be. Burns’ biography is an excellent case study to test their predictions.

References

Hammond, J. R. 2009. “Early Drafts of Friedman’s Methodology Essay.” In U. Mäki, ed., The Methodology of Positive Economics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 68-89.

Friedman, M. 1953. “The Methodology of Positive Economics.” In Essays in Positive Economics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 3–43.

Friedman, M. 1957. A Theory of the Consumption Function. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Friedman, M. 1962. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Friedman, M. and Friedman, R. 1980. Free to Choose: A Personal Statement. New York: Harcourt.

Friedman, M. and Schwartz, A. 1963. A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

 

{2024}{Metascience} 

Adolfo García de la Sienra.  A Structuralist Theory of Economics. London/New York: Routledge (INEM Advances in Economic Methodology), 2019. XII+222 pp.  

Adolfo García de la Sienra is one of the most prominent philosophers of economics in the Spanish-speaking world. He has held a meeting of the International Network for Economic Method in Xalapa and actively participates in the Sociedad Iberoamericana de Metodología Económica. Thanks to García de la Sienra, the structuralist approach to economics is now mature, with a full-fledged analysis of some of the most significant varieties of economic theorizing in the 20th century. This analysis is now thoroughly presented in A Structuralist Theory of Economics, where we also find García de la Sienra’s own take on the structuralist programme, connecting it with its Suppesian roots.

 

The first half of the book is an introduction to the pillars of the structuralist approach. In Chapter 1 we find the Suppes informal structural view, articulated on set-theoretical predicates and data structures, in which the key epistemic notion is the observational adequation between the two. Chapter 2 presents the concept of structure, drawing on the seminal work of Sneed and his school, on the one hand, and Da Costa and Chuaqui, on the other. Structures are informally defined as “a list of sets together with relations built over such sets” (p. 30). García de la Sienra then formalizes this intuition using types, to classify power sets, and a modified version of the Ackermann-Müller theory of classes. He is then ready to define set-theoretical predicates rich enough to capture the complexity of actual scientific theories. This is illustrated, in Chapter 3, with an analysis of classical particle mechanics, followed by a short but effective introduction to the key elements in the Sneedian structuralist view of theories (theory core, theory element, and theory nets).

 

García de la Sienra closes the first half of the book with two additional chapters on idealization and concretization (ch. 4) and measurement (ch. 5). In the former, García de la Sienra answers some regular objections against the ability of the structuralist view to grasp empirical phenomena. For García de la Sienra, scientific theories reach this grasp through the interplay of four items: there are, on the one hand, set-theoretical structures (intended applications, models of data) representing reality, but there are also, on the other hand, model systems (conjunctions of predicates expressing idealizations, in the sense of Mäki and Portides) and the real concrete systems that the former represent. This same dialectic between set-theoretical structures and its empirical targets reappears in chapter 5 with the distinction between metrization and measurement. For García de la Sienra, metrization occurs when an empirical property is proven mensurable, according to a given unit of measurement. The representational theory of measurement establishes the set-theoretical conditions under which such property is metrizable, independently of how it is actually measured.

 

This fifth chapter starts the transition from general philosophy of science to the philosophy of economics. In order to illustrate how metrization is achieved independently of the representational theory of measurement, García de la Sienra briefly discusses two classical 20th century controversies: the measurement of demand functions and the measurement theory debate. Chapter 6 establishes the target of any economic theory, the general concept of an economy, a structure covering four basic activities: production, distribution, exchange and consumption.

 

Chapter 7 covers preferences and utility where we find one of the author’s main conceptual achievements. For a structuralist, a preference relation may be idealized, but it is nonetheless empirical, and its content should be represented by a (theoretical) utility function. The problem is that in standard microeconomic theory, utility functions are continuously differentiable, a pre-requirement for the topological analysis of economic equilibrium. But what would be the empirical counterpart of differentiability in a preference relation? García de la Sienra suggests that differentiability captures a way in which the agent’s tastes are stable in the vicinity of any consumption menu. Capturing this apparently simple intuition requires a long mathematical digression showing the correspondence between algebraic and geometric difference structures, and then between the latter and preference structures. Against instrumentalist or positivist interpretations of utility theory, where its mathematical apparatus would not require any empirical justification provided it delivered empirically successful predictions, García de la Sienra vindicates a realist account in which every empirically meaningful element of a preference relation would be represented by the corresponding utility function.

 

No less original is the analysis of game theory in chapter 8. Focusing on dynamic games, García de la Sienra provides an axiomatic formulation from which the theory-element of neoclassical economics will emerge as a specialization. Its empirical content is captured as follows. On the one hand, García de la Sienra shows that behavioural strategies “determine a probability measure over the space of all possible histories of the game”, making some trajectories more probable than others -those that maximize the expected utility of the agent.  The empirical behaviour of economic agents generates a histogram over the same space. According to the author, the fundamental law of game theory states that such empirical distribution must approximate the probability measure -i.e., agents behave strategically and the empirical distribution approximates an equilibrium of the game.

 

In chapter 9 García de la Sienra solves the main conceptual problems that have ravaged the labor theory of value. He provides a general definition of abstract labor and a representational measurement of the same. He then shows that a uniform profit induces abstract labor, and finally he proves that a given determination of abstract labor induces a system of prices which is unique up to similarity transformations. In chapter 10, the author recasts classical economics fusing the labor theory of value with “neoclassical” economics, proving the existence of an equilibrium in which the prices are induced by labor value, they clear the markets, and all the agents maximize utility.

 

In chapter 11, he reconstructs, in the same vein, with Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. And to close the book, and his sweeping survey of economics, García de la Sienra tackles econometrics building up on Aris Spanos’ analysis of the connection between probability theory and data generation processes via model specification. And then the book ends up abruptly, without a conclusions chapter.  

 

As the reader may have already guessed, this is quite an impressive monograph for many different reasons. First, breadth and scope: A structuralist theory of economics is both a primer in some central themes in philosophy of science plus a broad introduction to economic theories, covering on equal grounds neoclassical and Marxist approaches. Although this is an exercise in formal philosophy of science, García de la Sienra makes the philosophical message clear at every step and, as conveyed -I hope- in the summary above, there are plenty of insightful intuitions. There are also some perplexities, let me just comment on a salient one.

 

Like many others, I have the impression that structuralist approach is perhaps too powerful, since it can reconstruct formally almost every articulated doctrine with a minimal amount of empirical content. Treating neoclassical and Marxist approaches on equal grounds shows, in my view, this sheer excess of power. Most practitioners and methodologists of economics would see these two approaches in open contradiction: García de la Sienra shows, with his reconstruction, that this is clearly not the case. Except that his reconstruction becomes something more than meta-theory: García del Sienra is actively picking up those threads in economics that will fit better with the structuralist template. This may be a legitimate strategy. After all, Suppes and his school tried to capture the distinguishing traits of the most successful scientific theories. If economics wants to achieve the same success, we should better focus on the structures it shares with other scientific disciplines.

 

Here comes the second perplexity: García de la Sienra’s analysis stops every time at the same point: the identification of the empirical claim of the theories reconstructed. He says very little about the truth of these empirical claims, despite decades of debate on whether economics succeeds at grasping the truth about the phenomena under analysis. But the reason for this, as he told me personally, is that whether a theory is successful in some applications is an entirely empirical matter. I hope the discussion of this empirical matter will provide a good enough reason for García de la Sienra to keep writing on economics.

{April, 2020}

{Theoria}

Paul Erickson, Judy L. Klein, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, Thomas Sturm, Michael D. Gordin, How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind. The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality, Chicago (Ill.), University of Chicago Press, 2013

Is rationality as clean and well-defined concept, such as a system of axioms, or rather a sticky syrup, like a “bowl of molasses”? Philosophers, at least within the analytic tradition, usually opt for axiomatic definitions and a paradigmatic illustration is, for instance, expected utility theory (EUT). Established by von Neumann and Morgenstern in 1947, and expanded later by Savage in 1954, it quickly became the paradigm for the analysis of decisions between uncertain alternatives, until the accumulation of experimental anomalies forced economists to search for alternatives –although none has completely displaced it, as of today. The normative appeal of EUT (as a warrant of consistency in our decisions) still captivates philosophers, but all this anomalies have forced us to rethink whether there is some axiomatic unity in our rational choices or whether our decisions are like molasses and EUT is just one bowl containing some.

Herbert Simon made the remark about the bowl of molasses commenting on how “the irrational is the boundary of the rational” (115). As I read it, How reason almost lost its mind(CWR from now on) is a book about such boundaries: the concepts that came to define rationality among the social scientists around the 1950s and 1960s would not have hold together were it not for the context (the bowl) provided by the Cold War.

The ideal type of Cold War Rationality (3-4) would be a formal algorithm providing mechanically the best solution for a given problem. These algorithms would originate in the analytical decomposition of the actions of a person of “seasoned experience and proven judgment” (43), so that anyone could implement such sets of rules and obtain the same success. Human calculators, computing variables for astronomers in many 19^th and 20^th century observatories, provide a paradigm of the rationality that Cold War would generalize, thanks mostly to the success of algorithms in foundational research on the paradoxes of set theory. Ideas then flew from the more abstract regions of mathematics to the social sciences, in a process accelerated by the II World War and its posterity.

One major issue in the historiography of rational choice theory is to what extent it was shaped by such context: for instance, is it something more than a formal rendition of the neoliberal ideology that emerged after the war? In this case, we may wonder whether the rules defining rationality were somehow tainted by their military uses. The answer of CWR seems mostly negative. For a start, Cold War Rationality is something more than a simple combination of decision and game theory. Bounded rationality was just as much a Cold War product. The organization of the airlift that would provide basic supplies to Berlin during the Soviet blockade started a research agenda on military management that ultimately led Herbert Simon to defend the necessity of non-optimizing decision rules. The limitations of information and computing power that plagued such projects left no alternative.

Even further from rational choice standards, but equally part of Cold War rationality was Charles Osgood’s GRIT, the acronym for “graduated and reciprocated initiatives for tension reduction”. Osgood, a psychologist, studied strategies for de-escalating conflicts –paradigmatically, in the nuclear arms race. Osgood did not establish his decision rules on formal grounds and, as CWR point out, they were difficult to test experimentally. But nonetheless they had the algorithmic form distinctive of the era. And there is even more to Cold War rationality. Rules did not only emerge in theoretical contexts as a solution to a given problem, be it formal or not. There was also empirical research on how rules emerged, via the analysis of “situations”. These were small group interactions placed in a context that could be externally controlled and observed: e.g., a negotiation in a room with microphones and one-way mirrors, as the one used by Robert Bales at the Harvard Laboratory of Social Relations in the 1950s. Decomposing the interaction into its minimal elements and coding how often they featured would allow social scientists to engineer future exchanges so that they yielded the desired outcomes.

If Cold War rationality is so diverse (and showing it is a major contribution of this book), we may well grant that its content was not constrained by one single agenda. But then what brings all these different algorithms together under the umbrella of rationality? The bowl containing this molasses would have been the military demand for procedures that could handle the complexity of Cold War issues –from nuclear strategies to logistics and negotiation processes. Military budgets funded research according to their needs, independently of any disciplinary boundary. The RAND Corporation was probably the most successful hotbed of Cold War rationality, but we can find research programs tied to the military in University departments all over the United States.

According to CWR, the threat of a nuclear conflictwas powerful enough to break through the different paradigms then available for the study of decision making and bring them into a real debate. Had it not been for the Cold War, the topic might have been studied along more conventional disciplinary paths, with a different level of mutual engagement.Just as it happened after the end of the Cold War. When the bowl of military demand cracked, the molasses of rationality spilled in a plethora of experiments that showed a plurality of decision rules at work (namely, heuristics and biases), more or less deviant regarding formal standards of rational choice.

CWR shows, in sum, that Cold War rationality was more diverse than rational choice theory and that the one in the many, bringing together all such diversity, was the nuclear threat providing the context. Both points are carefully argued and I have learnt a great deal with this volume. But, of course, it is my task to challenge them –trying to live up, I hope, to the spirit of those foundational Cold War debates.

Starting with diversity, the authors define their ideal type in the most encompassing manner, but they often argue as if the canon within Cold War rationality was rational choice theory. I don’t think, at least, that any other of the approaches discussed in the book exhibits to the same degree the features of the type listed in p.5: formal methods modelling self-interested individuals in conflict, with a radical simplification of the circumstances and a step-by-step impersonal approach to a solution. As the authors acknowledge (p. 94), GRIT rulesfor conflict resolution are not as algorithmic as the identification of Nash equilibria. Even if the setting put individuals in conflict, situation rooms apparently neither sought nor yieldeddecision rules (p. 124). And certainly “the collapse of Cold War rationality” came with experimental tests of rational choice models. The other research agendas sparked by the nuclear threat apparently did not make it that far: whereas Cold War results in, e.g., game theory are still part of the standard curriculum in some social sciences, most other topics addressed in this book only belong in the history of their disciplines.

Why not telling the story of Cold War rationality, in all its diversity, giving its weight to its difference constituents? At this point it wouldn’t seem Whiggish, just an acknowledgment of the longer reach of rational choice theory among Cold War theories. My impression is that the authors do not seem very inclined to make such distinction, because they implicitly disagree with the sort of social science associated with rational choice theory (e.g., “the notoriously mean and lean Homo economicus”, p. 185), and they treat it as if its time was already past. This is how I make sense, at least, of the title of the book: “How Reason Almost Lost its Mind”. The reduction of rationality to formal decision models seems was often achieved “at the expense of reason” (p.2), where this latter is understood as the sort of Enlightened wisdom that an automaton can just poorly imitate. The “almost” in the title seems to suggest that the Cold War is over and there is a chance for reason to regain its grounds. Thereby, perhaps, the surprise at philosophers still spending so much time on rational choice theory as of today (p. 187). But what are the reasonable alternatives that we should be discussing instead?

I would have expected though that a historical analysis of Cold War rationality would have made explicit instances of such alternatives at the point where they were perhaps considered and discarded. Taking up again, by way of instance, EUT, it might have been more fruitfulto discuss how a reasonable decision rule from the Enlightement(Bernoullian utility functions) became the standard of Cold War decision making? After all, choosing between uncertain alternatives according to an average (expected utility maximization) is just an option among others (why not focusing on the variance). What made it so attractivecirca 1940?Can we explain its normative appeal on a priori considerations (such as Savage’s Dutch Book argument) or is it also ideological?After all, the alternatives to EUT now under construction among decision theorists (prospect theory, etc.) are closer to Cold War rationality standards than to any sort of mindful reason. And this was the case already in the 1950s: think of Allais’ arguments about the reasonability of EUT. So what is the reason beyond rationality in CWR?

Alternatively, we may wonder whether the Cold War is really over, as far as the idea of rationality in the social sciences is concerned. The contextual pressure of a nuclear threat may have propelled the deployment of rational choice theory in the social sciences. But probably something else is keeping it in place now, for the right or the wrong reasons.Reading CWR I cannot understand well why such algorithmic standards of rationality still prevail. The answer might not be epistemic at all: since the American military and the policy makers were mostly alone on the demand side for rationality during the Cold War, I can’t help wondering whether they were satisfied with the outcome they funded so generously. Perhaps the survival of Cold War Rationality is, after all, the survival of the intellectual institutions that won such War. Historians are certainly among the few who can answer that.

{September, 2014}

{History of the Human sciences, 2017}

U. Mäki, ed., Philosophy of Economics [Handbook of the Philosophy of Science, vol. 13], Amsterdam, Elsevier, 2012, 903 pp. 

Uskali Mäki’s latest edited collection, Philosophy of Economics, appears as the 13^th volume in the Handbook of Philosophy of Science, an Elsevier series presented by its editors as “the most comprehensive review ever provided of the philosophy of science”. Three of the seventeen volumes are devoted to social disciplines: apart from economics there is another one for linguistics, and a joint volume for sociology and anthropology. As Mäki points out in his general introduction, economic methodology is closer today to “frontline philosophy of science” (p. xv) than ever before in its very short life as an independent field. This volume marks its coming of age, and it should be celebrated as such.

Reviewing a nearly 1000 pages volume in about 1000 words seems not easy, so let me try to grasp its significance through a comparison with its obvious predecessor The Handbook of Economic Methodology, co-edited by Mäki, John Davis and Wade Hands for Edward Elgar in 1998. This latter was based on short entries, while the 2012 volume consists of regular size papers. Rather than discussing the content of every one of them –and for the suspicious reader, yes, I spent my Christmas break going through it from cover to cover–, I will try to see what this book as a whole reveals about the philosophy of economics as it is cultivated today.

We should notice first that 12 of the 29 authors in the 2012 volume featured already in the previous installment and 9 of them write on almost the same topics: Mäki on realism, R. Backhouse on Lakatos, M. Morgan on models, K. Hoover on causality, H. Kincaid on economic explanation, W. Hands on the positive-normative dichotomy, C. W. Granger on economic forecasting, A. Spanos on econometrics and V. Vanberg on rational choice and rule following. As the reader may guess, most of these pieces take stock of decades of reflections on each topic and sometimes provide real primers on the author’s views. For example, Spanos’ 70 pages paper on “the philosophy of econometrics” is, in fact, an excellent introduction to the error-statistical approach with a final section on the title. Philip Mirowski’s “The Unreasonable Efficacy of Mathematics in Economics” is a reconsideration of most Mirowskian themes (physics’ envy, computers and markets, etc.) from a new angle (what sort of philosophical approach to mathematics would do justice to its uses in economics). Some of these veterans present instead research conducted after the publication of that first Handbook: for example, John Davis on individuals in economics or Marcel Boumans on measurement.

There are topics in the 2012 volume that have grown beyond anyone’s expectations fifteen years ago. Alan Nelson’s 1998 entry on “Experimental economics” called for further methodological reflections on internal and external validity, now accomplished in Francesco Guala’s piece for the 2012 volume, drawing on a decade of his own work. Herbert Simon claimed in 1998 that “behavioural economics is not so much a specific body of economic theory as a critique of neoclassical economic theory and methodology”. But Erik Angner and George Loewenstein present it in their 2012 paper as a “bona fide subdiscipline of economics”. I could not find in the 1998 index a mention of the ultimatum game, for which there is a paper in 2012 by Cristina Bicchieri and Jiji Zhang (about the incorporation of norms of justice into decision models). Dan Hausman writes about the experimental testing of game theory, another virtually absent topic in the 1998 handbook. Summing up, the papers explicitly addressing experiments claim 133 of the 903 pages of the 2012 volume, whereas they barely add to 10 of the 572 pages in the previous installment.

Other topics have not changed so dramatically. Apart from experiments, it seems as if nothing is radically different in the philosophy of game theory (T. Grüne-Yanoff and A. Letihnen) and rational choice theory (P. Anand). The methodological debate on disciplines such as evolutionary economics, feminist economics and public choice is mostly the same if we judge it from the content of the papers by, respectively, Jack Vromen, Kristina Rolin and Hartmut Kliemt. The piece on the economics of science was programmatic in 1998, whereas now Jesús Zamora Bonilla provides a survey of actual contributions. Most results in judgment aggregation date from this last decade so the short (and helpful) introduction written by Christian List is a real novelty in this volume. Geographical economics is also a new topic, but not because the discipline is new but rather thanks to a philosopher (Caterina Marchionni) who has decided to tackle its methodology.

At this point, the reader might be wondering what has been left behind in economic methodology. The most significant loss is the history of economic thought: organized in short dictionary-like entries, in the 1998 volume there were many about particular economists; but in 2012 only Mirowski adopts a full-fledged historical approach. Is this is a sign of how the profession is evolving? Whereas many of the senior contributors had a separate career as historians (Backhouse, Hands, Hoover, Morgan, etc.), this is less common among their junior peers (Angner is probably the most significant exception). However, there is an increasing (but still far from consensual) advocacy for an integration of History and Philosophy of science among practitioners of this latest discipline (e.g., Hasok Chang). Given how prominent this integration has been during decades in the case of economics, I think a more explicit reflection on the virtues (or flaws) of doing philosophy in such close connection with history could have been useful.

The second, but minor, loss is Marxism. In the 1998 Index it was explicitly mentioned in about 30 pages. In 2012 it is just mentioned five times, all in the same paper. In it we find, I think, the more original contribution to this volume, as compared to its predecessor. Don Ross’ “Economic Theory, Anti-economics and Political Ideology”, classifies five principled objections against economics as a purely positive endeavor and proceeds to refute them. Ross argues that economists defending the efficiency of markets are not promoting partisan views, if their arguments are read literally or, if they do, they are not representative of the profession. “The economic attitude –he claims– is consistent with policies drawn from anywhere on the left-right spectrum that acknowledges scarcity as fundamental to political and social organization” (p. 280). Ross’ strategy is to subvert the popular understanding of economic theories drawing on a combination of conceptual analysis and historical acumen (an integrated HPS, after all?). The reader will find another take on the same approach in his other paper in this compilation, “The economic agent: Not Human, But Important”, where he defends his well-known thesis that economic agency reliably captures bug-like decision making, but still is useful to understand ours. In other words, economics is a perfectly positive science, provided you have the proper concept of what economics and science are. I was unable to find anyone so bold about it in the 1998 volume.

It is significant that both Don Ross and Harold Kincaid have two papers each in this volume (unlike every other contributor), totaling 130 pages. In a decade of joint work, they have renewed our understanding of the philosophy of the social sciences putting forward a variety of naturalism that combines their own versions of contextualism (Kincaid) and structural realism (Ross). Following the path of Uskali Mäki, Alex Rosenberg or Dan Hausman in the 1990s, they have addressed economics in connection with broader problems in philosophy of science –in this respect, I guess it would have been fair to include a chapter by/about Nancy Cartwright’s views, the other great contender in this league. This is probably the take home lesson of this volume for newcomers in the discipline: stay close to actual practice (e.g, experiments) and make your philosophical position as general as possible (as Kincaid and Ross have done).

But speaking of newcomers, I should say something about the audience of this volume. Namely, that I do not see very clearly who their readers are. Its size and price (165 EUR) make it clearly a reference work for libraries, but not every paper is suitable for just the curious reader or first year student: all of them are very good, but some are very long, some are narrow in their approach (or very personal) and few suggest the reader where to go next. In addition, I think that, as an intellectual community, we are about to exhaust the Handbook genre for pure lack of diversity (and I plead myself guilty since I have contributed to three similar volumes in the last five years). Ross and Kincaid have their fair share of Mäki’s compilation, but they have edited themselves two other Handbooks for Oxford, where they extensively present their views (and so do Mäki, Vromen, Guala and a few other authors of this volume). I also read Ross, Guala and Knuuttila in another Handbook co-edited by Zamora Bonilla for Sage. This is probably the Matthew effect, but I wonder if our university libraries will really benefit from acquiring all these collections every ten years. Perhaps we should invest more in new editorial formats (like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) that perform more or less the same function in a more updated and accessible way. de

{December  2012}

{Journal of Economic Methodology, 21.1 (2014)  96-98 }

Pierre-Charles Pradier, La notion de risque en économie, Paris, La Découverte, 2006

Encore un ouvrage sur l'économie du risque ! Celui-ci choisit une optique assez originale, entre histoire économique et histoire des théories économiques. Si l'histoire des faits et de leurs représentations sociales constitue une tradition française, déjà illustrée dans le domaine du risque par François Ewald, héritier de Foucault et de l'école des Annales, on est moins habitué à voir un économiste s'essayer au même exercice. Doyen d'Économie de la Sorbonne, Pierre-Charles Pradier déploie toute son érudition pour brosser une fresque où le paysage des contrées du Nord, hébergeant les fondateurs du calcul des probabilités, succède à l'Italie des marchands médiévaux.

Précisément, le récit articule trois temps forts : l'apparition du mot, du concept et des pratiques du risque au Moyen-Âge ; le développement des mathématiques du hasard, de la gestion assurantielle et de la statistique mathématique à l'époque des Lumières ; enfin, l'essor récent de la théorie économique et financière - que ce soit du point de vue décisionnel a priori ou du point de vue macroéconomique a posteriori (avec l'énigme de la prime de risque et l'inflation des actifs patrimoniaux en conclusion). Ces temps forts permettent d'illustrer une thèse assez audacieuse : contre ceux qui pensent - comme on le croit souvent - que l'économie a emprunté les mathématiques du hasard aux sciences de la nature, Pradier montre au contraire que « le calcul des probabilités se développe comme solution à des questions sociales et politiques », solution apportée par des mathématiciens intéressés à la vie de la Cité. Hervé Le Bras avait déjà éclairé la vie de William Petty d'une telle lumière dans Naissance de la mortalité ; voici quelques exemples nouveaux qui font système.

À côté de cette thèse centrale, l'auteur propose des points de vue originaux sur des thèmes que l'on croyait convenus : ainsi, le parallèle entre, d'une part, le développement des mathématiques de la décision depuis l'après-guerre et, d'autre part, les recherches de la fin du dix-huitième siècle. Cette comparaison s'appuie sur les travaux d'historiens des mathématiques menés ces quinze dernières années et conduit à penser différemment l'articulation entre économie et mathématiques, leur histoire commune et leur épistémologie. De même, l'étude critique de la distinction entre risque et incertitude chez Knight, et surtout Keynes, met en perspective l'évolution de la théorie économique au cours du dernier siècle et les limites de son domaine d'application. Cette perspective d'histoire longue - la prise en compte de nombreux aspects et champs théoriques (finance, assurance, macroéconomie) - conduit évidemment à des raccourcis ; mais la thèse est remarquable et la bibliographie abondante. Signalons enfin, pour ceux que les « hiéroglyphes effarouchants » intimident, que des encadrés contiennent les signes les plus virulents : la lecture de l'argument est donc fluide. Étonnamment même pour un livre d'économie qui devrait donc convenir à ceux qui abordent l'économie du risque comme à ceux qui la connaissent déjà et cherchent un regard nouveau.

{Septembre 2006}
{Risques 67 (2006)}

Julian Reiss, Error in Economics. Towards a more evidence-based methodology, London, Routledge, 2007.

Julian Reiss’ monograph presents a normative case for an empiricist methodology in economics. According to the author, economists should focus on measuring social variables in order to find causal relationships among them. They should investigate the stability of these relationships in different contexts and, in case it exists, inquire about the underlying abstract factors and establish economic laws. In this process, economists should bear in mind the practical purposes their research is supposed to serve (if there are any) so that the best methods to achieve those aims are always chosen.

The case for this evidence-based approach is articulated in nine chapters divided into three parts. In part one, Reiss discusses economic measurement in a single case study: the Consumer Price Index (CPI) controversy. The second part focuses on causality, drawing on different instances of actual economic research: experimental economics, thought experiments, instrumental variables, etc. The author is pessimistic about the number of economic factors with stable causal capacities found by economists so far, and therefore the third part is not about economic laws, but rather about the prospects of getting them and using them in policy-making. Provided there are good evidential grounds, the more pluralistic economists are in their methodologies, the more likely it seems they will be successful, even if the author makes no promises about it: “the empirical road has not been walked yet and we do not know where it would lead us if we do walk it” (183).

Reiss’ argument for a more evidence-based methodology does not rely on the virtues of a particular technique he wants to promote, but rather on the problems of the standard theory-driven approach discussed in the book. His trust in the possibility of an evidence-based alternative is a matter of philosophical conviction: if the epistemic prejudices of the economic profession against purely inductive methodologies can be removed, these could flourish and yield a more convincing economics. Reiss’ conviction owes much to Nancy Cartwright’s philosophy of the social sciences. This allows him, for instance, to be critical about the ability of mainstream economists to use clinching methods of causal inference. One possible response that Kevin Hoover explores below is that they may have been walking the vouching road to causality, a less demanding one but with no result in the end either. This does not imply that it cannot be done, but it should temper the author’s methodological hopes (and perhaps explain the profession’s pessimism). Aris Spanos challenges in turn the conceptual foundations of this optimism: Reiss can invoke Bacon and be confident on the possibility of correcting errors through a variety of methods to deal with evidence, but it takes a bit more statistical sophistication to define evidence in a way which warrants real error-correction.

Reiss’ programme hinges on evidence and causality, but also on a pragmatic view on values: evidence is sound when it gives a licence to act and attain our epistemic and non-epistemic aims. Depending on our purposes, we should choose the more adequate methodology to gather the relevant evidence. Reiss denounces how economists focus on certain kinds of epistemic values which prevent them from gathering the evidence politicians request (ch. 5, 10). Methodologists and economists are also criticised for adopting epistemic values that constrain empirical research without much scientific profit (ch. 8-9).

Error in economics opens with the explicit admission that evidence alone will not solve neither our theoretical nor practical disagreements: values are required to decide which is the correct CPI (ch. 2-4). But values are diverse and make us disagree, no matter how much causal evidence is gathered. Why should we expect evidence-based economics to overcome such controversies about values? An inspiring example for Reiss seems to be the community of physicists who constructed a unified scale to measure temperature throughout a century of experiments, even if there was no definition of temperature on which they could agree a priori. In his Inventing Temperature (2007) Hasok Chang shows that their success is better explained by a coherentist epistemology with a minimum of theoretical commitments. In order to measure temperature, a scale is necessary, but at first there were many and all of them arbitrary to a certain point. I.e., there was no self-evident basis to ground the inquiry. The choice between all these scales, claims Chang, was made possible by an implicit agreement on a set of epistemic values that presided over the experiments, independently of the theoretical commitments of each physicist. Gradually, the accumulation of evidence made them agree on a scale of measurement under the coherentist pressure of their shared values. In a similar vein, Reiss argues that if economists reached an empirically oriented agreement on their epistemic and non-epistemic aims, their measurements would progress (more than it did in the past century, at least). Yet, he admits, non-epistemic values make economists disagree as much as epistemic values. Can we expect that, once they agree on this latter, the former will cease to disturb their agreement?

I suspect that Reiss optimism about evidence-based economics presupposes some sort of affirmative answer. My own pessimism is based on the existence of empirical traditions in economics where, despite a certain number of shared values, disagreement in measurement persists. My example of choice is Milton Friedman, whose 1953 methodological piece is surprisingly parallel to Reiss’ in some respects. Friedman wanted the economic profession to align around the accuracy of predictions, keeping theoretical commitments to a minimum. The lighter the theoretical apparatus, the easier would be to classify data in separate markets (Marshallians are epistemic contextualists) and obtain predictions that should be judged for their success alone. Besides, for our practical purposes, argued Friedman, we need nothing more than predictive success (close to pragmatism as many were in Chicago). As Kevin Hoover puts it below, Friedman was an empiricist “just as Reiss thinks we ought to be”.

My pessimism about evidence-based economics à la Reiss comes thus from the fate of Friedman’s own evidence-based agenda. I have studied elsewhere how Friedman’s work on consumption usually elicited controversies that never yielded a professional consensus, despite both its solid methodological grounds and the accuracy of his predictions (Teira forthcoming). An issue very often at stake in these controversies was the definition of the variables in the analysis. Friedman’s predictions were always grounded on a classification of data under economic variables without much theoretical clinching. As he once put it, a commodity X is just a label, “not a word for a physical or technical entity to be defined once and for all independently of the problem at hand”. When the economist defined a commodity X once and for every market (as Walrasians intended), empirical analysis became increasingly complicated. More strict definitions, thought Friedman, made data sets unusable and, yet, economists are very often urged to use them by police-makers for whom a suboptimal response is better than none. And economists, thought Friedman, should provide it. Coherence in the definition of variables across their many uses did not count as much for Friedman as it did for Chang’s thermologists, who could safely ignore the practical implications of their experiments.

Yet, no matter how accurate Friedman’s predictions were, if anyone disagreed, one could always contest the definition of the variables used to obtain the predictions: “these data are not X” or “these data should be X as well” – Reiss himself notices this regarding money (p. 130). Unlike temperature, economic variables are difficult to define on the basis of a set of uncontroversial experiments acknowledged by everyone in the profession. As the CPI controversy shows, when disagreement on values occurs, disagreement on measurement procedures follows. Hence progress in economic measurement will only happen if either the community shares epistemic and non-epistemic values (so that they don’t have practical incentives to disagree) or the measurement procedure is strong enough to overcome political divergences.

Good science, says Reiss, “reduces the prejudices and preconceptions of the individual scientist to a minimum”. We may legitimately ask how evidence-based economics achieves this reduction and succeeds when other empiricist agendas in economics failed. Evidence-based economics is a “research project under construction” and indeed one of its many merits is that it raises issues that other approaches in economics neglect. It is open to debate whether Reiss’ evidence-based alternative offers any real hope of solving them, but epistemic optimists should certainly try to walk this road.

{January 2009}
{Economics and philosophy, 25.2 (2009), pp. 199-201}

Partha Dasgupta, An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution, Oxford & N.York, Clarendon Press & Oxford U.P., 1993

El Ensayo sobre el bienestar y la pobreza extrema de Partha Dasgupta, Frank Ramsey professor of economics de la Universidad de Cambridge y especialista consagrado en economía del desarrollo, no ha conocido demasiado eco en nuestros medios filosóficos, pese a los cinco años transcurridos desde su edición original (a la que antecedieron un buen número de artículos y escritos que en él cristalizan, como después seguirían otros). Aun cuando ya no sea una novedad en sentido estricto, su importancia bien merece una recensión en este monográfico de Isegoría.

La presente obra de Partha Dasgupta constituye, en efecto, una aportación de notable originalidad a las doctrinas actualmente vigentes sobre el desarrollo económico, respecto a las cuales nos ofrece, muy elaborada, una teoría alternativa sobre el análisis de la distribución de recursos entre unidades domésticas (households). Mas su originalidad no la apreciará sólo el experto en la materia, que acaso haya sido el primer sorprendido con su lectura: la teoría se formula con objeto de evaluar los posibles planes de desarrollo económico aplicables por el Estado en países subdesarrollados y, con ese propósito, la obra se inicia con una discusión, que ocupa toda su primera parte -131 pp.-, sobre los fundamentos éticos que cabe atribuir, en general, a la intervención del Estado en la economía, abordada Dasgupta en clave del contractualismo contemporáneo.

Pero tales criterios de evaluación no se extraen “deductivamente” de las doctrinas de Rawls o sus epígonos, ya que en su discusión desempeñan, a su vez, un papel principal tanto conceptos tomados de la misma economía del desarrollo, como la casuística considerada para su aplicación, todo lo cual viene a modularlas decisivamente. Así, el concepto de necesidades básicas (basic needs), desarrollado por economistas de su especialidad desde mediados de este siglo, le sirve a Dasgupta como eje para establecer su idea de libertad y su formulación contractual: se trata de definir aquellas necesidades (nutritivas, sanitarias, educativas...) cuya satisfacción es imprescindible aun tan solo para poder aspirar a obtener los propios fines, y sería por ello tema central del contrato, pese a su ausencia en tantas otras formulaciones del mismo. Pero tan importante como este concepto de necesidad es el rico y abundante material empírico en el que Dasgupta se apoya para construir su definición, como es la literatura médica, etnológica etc. acerca de la pobreza extrema en países como la India o los del África subsahariana. Sin estos conceptos y evidencias sería, en efecto, imposible una evaluación efectiva de los programas de desarrollo propuestos para estas regiones, y es en estas labores donde, para Dasgupta, ha de ejercitarse la auténtica filosofía moral y política, aun cuando ello suponga la reinterpretación, si no el abandono, de muchos de sus argumentos -el capítulo trece, sobre dilemas morales de natalidad, es a estos respectos ejemplar-.

No menos afectada resulta la propia doctrina actualmente vigente en las cátedras de esta disciplina económica -adecuadamente expuesta en toda la parte segunda del ensayo-, pues nuestro autor se apoya tanto en la argumentación filosófica anterior, como en su misma inadecuación empírica, para mostrar la conveniencia de reconstruirla, si es que se han de obtener de ella mejores criterios sobre la distribución gubernamental de recursos en países como los antes apuntados. Ello le exige volver sobre los mismos fundamentos de la teoría, para integrar en ellos la evaluación de aquellas necesidades que debieran satisfacerse para optimizar el aprovechamiento de dichas políticas de desarrollo. La sombra del marxismo no deja aquí de advertirse, y no solo por el funesto papel que, para el autor, desempeñó el industrialismo soviético en el subdesarrollo de muchos países del hemisferio sur, sino por la divergencia que se aprecia en las mismas fuentes de su análisis: si las pautas de producción y consumo del proletariado fabril eran la norma respecto a la cual debía conducirse la revolución soviética, para Dasgupta son los desposeídos de África y Asia, sus necesidades alimentarias, médicas y educativas, el punto de partida tanto del estudio como de la ulterior acción gubernamental.

Determinar positivamente estas necesidades se convierte, por consiguiente, en motivo central de la obra, tanto como la formulación de una teoría económica alternativa sobre el desarrollo a partir de éstas, y a ello se dedican las dos últimas partes de la obra -tercera y cuarta, 325 pp.-. Y la mayor innovación aquí, dejando aparte la maestría de Dasgupta en la disposición de los cálculos, se encuentra, a nuestro entender, en la modulación del materialismo cultural (la escuela etnológica asociada mayoritariamente al nombre de Marvin Harris) efectuada por el autor con objeto de establecer tales necesidades. Siendo, obviamente, la nutrición una de las más elementales, no es extraño que Dasgupta recurra al análisis calórico como clave para su estudio en dichas regiones, pero es también consciente (y aquí es donde supera la perspectiva etnológica) de que sanidad o educación, -entendidas con arreglo a cánones no por europeos (la escuela, el hospital) menos universales- son igualmente factores decisivos en la consecución del desarrollo económico. La elaboración de índices con arreglo a los cuales conjugar su evaluación ofrece notables dificultades que nuestro autor resuelve con audacia. Y una consecuencia, no menor, creemos, es la superación del relativismo cultural, tan frecuente en este género de análisis.

Dasgupta llega, por fin, a ofrecer, en los dos últimos capítulos de la obra los fundamentos de una política de reforma agrícola como eje del desarrollo económico en países como los anteriormente mencionados, mostrando como, mediante la provisión de infraestructuras adecuadas, la intensificación de la explotación agrícola familiar proveería incluso recursos para financiar el acceso a la tierra, política que se complementaría además con programas alimentarios, médicos y educativos, con notables efectos, entre otros, sobre la natalidad o la vertebración de las distintas comunidades implicadas en su desarrollo. Todo ello apoyado, además, sobre una numerosas experiencias parciales anteriores a modo de indicio de su viabilidad.

El alcance de su obra, a la vista de su conclusión, es en verdad imponente. Como término de comparación y muestra de ello, cabría mencionar la intersección de ética y economía que obtiene Philippe van Parijs con sus ensayos sobre el denominado salario universal garantizado (basic income): partiendo de un concepto de libertad en muchos aspectos análogo al de Dasgupta -libertad real, y no sólo formal, de poder hacer lo que se desea-, van Parijs ensaya una defensa ética (libertaria) de un política de redistribución de recursos en el contexto de los actuales Estados del bienestar europeos, consistente en ofrecer incondicionalmente a cada cual en metálico, y no en forma de servicios, su cuota en el reparto. La formulación de la propuesta (como las misma doctrina económica en la que se inspira, el negative income tax de Friedman) atenta contra la más elemental sindéresis política (originariamente se pedía, la supresión de la seguridad social, apoyándose en un somero estudio sobre curvas de Laffer); su expansión universal, como ha llegado a proponerse, más allá del área donde el Estado del Bienestar efectivamente existe, no puede resultar menos ridícula. La lectura de las propuestas de Dasgupta es, en cambio, un ejemplo de rigor, tanto por la documentación de las propuestas como por la mesura y tino tanto de su formulación como en la elección del dominio en el que se sugiere aplicarlas.

La mayor objeción que se nos ocurre sobre este ensayo, es si acaso Dasgupta no disociará excesivamente la marcha general de la economía de un país del área de intervención del Estado que él propone, como si ambos operasen disociados, y no se diesen en aquélla factores que obran contra la ejecución de planes de desarrollo tales como el que esboza en su obra. Apelar a la cogencia de los argumentos contractuales no quiere decir, al cabo, que estos tengan efecto económico por sí solos.

{Enero 1998}
{Isegoría 18 (1998), pp.242-44}