Nat Dyer: 'Midgley amongst the economists' скачать в хорошем качестве

Nat Dyer: 'Midgley amongst the economists'

ABSTRACT Mary Midgley had an unfashionable - for her time - view of the role of philosophy as the field whose job it was to map the relationships between different areas of knowledge. In her own life - and her writing on evolutionary theories - she grappled with what she saw as fantastical and overly-simple economic theories such as Marxism and Thatcherism. However, Midgley never engaged in an extended critique of economists or their methods. Despite this, author Nat Dyer argues that her work contains numerous insights and approaches which can provide a fruitful and profound critique of recent economic orthodoxy. Drawing on his 2024 book, Ricardo's Dream, Nat maps out the various ways in which Midgley's work - especially her writing on reductionism and scientism - illuminates economics. For example: 1) her insistence on the role of imaginative world pictures in the construction of apparently objective, quantified models and theories such as the so-called 'rational' homo economicus; 2) her insights into the trouble we can fall in when 'experts' toggle between the technical and common meanings of words, especially emotive terms such as 'rational' and 'efficient'; 3) the failure of mainstream economics, which views the natural world as an 'externality', to grasp the importance of a holistic, ecological approach. The talk also aims to light up some of Midgley's thinking from a new angle. It puts Midgley in conversation with the British statistician George Box and suggests an overlap in the way that Box thought of quantified models and Midgley thought of myths (ie. that 'all models/myths are wrong but some are useful'.) And, how the Greek myth of the sculptor Pygmalion - who fell in love with his own statue - is a useful analogy for experts who fall in love with their own artificial model of the world and ignore the complexity of the real world.