Tag Archives: economic science

Why “there is no such thing as economic science”?

I have recently referred to an interview made to Piketty where he states “there is no such thing as economic science. There are social sciences”. He argues that “economic processes involve social control” and that “we should teach ‪economics‬ much more in conjunction with economic‪ ‎history‬, social history, political history, political science”

That said, the truth is that Piketty’s argument is deductible from the classic economic sociology concept embeddedness. It refers to the degree to which economic activity is constrained by non-economic institutions. The term was created by economic historian Karl Polanyi as part of his Substantivist approach. Polanyi argued that in non-market societies there are no pure economic institutions to which formal economic models can be applied. In these cases economic activities such as “provisioning” are “embedded” in non-economic kinship, religious and political institutions. In market societies, in contrast, economic activities have been rationalized, and economic action is “disembedded” from society and able to follow its own distinctive logic, captured in economic modeling. Polanyi’s ideas were widely adopted and discussed in anthropology in what has been called the “Formalist vs Substantivist” debate. Subsequently, the term “embeddedness” was further developed by economic sociologist Mark Granovetter, who argued that even in market societies, economic activity is not as disembedded from society as economic models would suggest.

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“There is no such thing as economic science. There are social sciences” #piketty #income #wealth #distribution

Thomas ‪Piketty‬: “There is no such thing as economic science. There are social sciences, economic processes involved social control…
We should teach ‪economics‬ much more in conjunction with economic‪ ‎history‬, social history, political history, political science. It’s just impossible to study issues such as dynamics of ‪income‬ and ‪wealth‬, distribution‬ in a purely economic manner. It’s very important that students in economics don’t lose all the energy in abstract mathematical models… [But] too often economists have been doing the opposite: which is [using] very sophisticated mathematical model to explain very little empirical material or sometimes no empirical material at all…
[In order to promote economic ‎justice‬] the first important thing to do is‪ democratization‬ of economic knowledge. Too often bad economic ‎policy‬and economic policies in the interests of the wealthy come from the fact that we, sort of, abandon economic knowledge to group of ‘specialists’ and ‘exerts'”