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Ecology in the Mirror of Economics
Philip E. Mirowski
University of Notre Dame
I would like to start with some comments by Richard Levins, reported in
(Callebaut, 1993, pp.262-3):
"The gene as the fundamental unit of the individual organism is paralleled
to some extent in the search for the fundamental unit of ecological
systems...ecologists have come up with the notion of energy...The notion of
energy as the fundamental thing to look at as the universal medium of
exchange is clearly brought into biology by analogy with economic
exchange...
There was a hope... that we could ignore all the complexity of interacting
species, the heterogeneity of populations, the complexities of competition
and symbiosis, of mutation and predation, and reduce everything to a single
medium if ecological exchange, which was designated as 'energy'."
I am very taken with this narrative, but am surprized that no one
to my knowledge has seriously followed up on the implications of this
insight. (Does anyone know otherwise?) For instance, Kingsland (1985),
Hagen (1992), and Worster (1994) all acknowledge to a greater or lesser
extent the impact that economics has had on the history of ecology; but
they uniformly let the observation pass, as though the implications would
be too obvious (or too distressing?) to explore further. There may be the
following explanations of this blind spot:
* Historians of economics have done such a lousy job
of providing something beyond a naive Whig narrative
for outsiders to access.
* Levins' comments are discounted as being those of a
'Marxist'.
* The sources of inspiration of scientific models are
treated as irrelevant, perhaps under the old context
of discovery/ context of justification distinction.
* Biologists have gone through this before with the
Malthus-Darwin connection, and find such contextualizations
boring.
* Counter-histories of ecological concerns such as
that by Martinez-Alier (1987) also misrepresent the
cultural imperatives driving disciplinary discourse
in economics.
Whatever the reason, I will argue that the ecology/economics
historical connection should be accorded much more attention, since it is
of paramount significance for understanding the quandry in which the
discipline of ecology finds itself. Some implications of this historical
narrative may be:
* The disparity between the public perceptions of the
content and the actual scientific practices of ecology
is closely paralleled by that in economics. Hence
continued research support is predicated upon strong
boundary conditions to keep the layman out.
* The belief that ecological concerns are intrinsically
opposed to economic considerations is confounded by
the fact of this shared discourse.
* Both ecology and economics have an interest in
positing a pristine Nature external to social relations,
but their shared theoretical orientations belie such
claims. When this is pointed out, some historians tend
to start blaming the problem on postmodernism or other
despised trends, as does Worster in his (1995). This
indictment is seriously misplaced.
* The historical connection may help explain why the
sub-field of 'environmental economics' seems so
irrelevant and unpromising to many scientists and
most ecologists. From this perspective, it can be
regarded as a closed monologue, a later version of
economics talking to its earlier incarnation.
SOME STRIKING HISTORICAL PARALLELS
***Preliminary apology: I am only working from secondary sources in the
history of ecology.***
"[T]o a great extent, ecology today has become 'bioeconomics': a cognate,
or perhaps even subordinate, division of economics." (Worster, 1994, p.292)
I want to raise the ante here, and suggest that the parallels between the
histories of economics and ecology over the last century or so are much
closer than anyone has noticed or commented upon. The place to start is the
frame-tale of the rise to dominance of the neoclassical orthodoxy in
economics, defeating first the German Historicist and American
Institutionalist movements, and then itself exiling the British Marshallian
variant in favor of a more scientistic version in America in the 1930s-50s.
The key is to understand neoclassicism as initially an outgrowth of the
European-wide "energetics" movement of the later 19th century. The standard
mathematical portrayal of individual "utility" was lifted fairly directly
from classical mechanics (Mirowski, 1989) as an attempt to unify physics,
psychology and economics. Personal utility was portrayed as a field of
potential energy emanating from the individual, whereas purchasing power
was less openly equated with kinetic energy; constrained optimization was
reinterpreted as individual striving to satisfy desires. Energetics as a
cultural movement (representatives: Ostwald, Helm, Solvay) went into rapid
decline at the turn of the century; but neoclassical economics managed to
disengage itself from any taint of energetics, largely through the efforts
of the British school of Alfred Marshall. This orthodoxy of the "laws of
supply and demand" was in turn rejected when leadership passed from Britain
to America in the 1930s, in favor of a more concertedly mathematical
version of neoclassicism, which was phrased in a more uncompromisingly
individualist idiom, even while forging an accomodation with Keynesian
macroeconomics. The 'stabilization' of the neoclassical orthodoxy by the
1950s masked some contrary trends, however. One was the attempt to revive
the earlier 'Marshallian' orthodoxy under the rubric of the 'Chicago
school' of Milton Friedman. Another was the incursion of various
'cybernetic' themes which initially seemed subsumed by the orthodoxy--
operations research, linear programming, game theory-- but were either
rejected or repressed in the standard curriculum. In the 1980s the
neoclassical orthodoxy ran into verious problems, and over the course of
the decade managed to shift the center of gravity of the core orthodoxy
from the static constrained optimization of utility towards the Nash
equilibrium in game theory (Rizvi, 1994).
Perhaps the most important themes for our present purposes in this
history are the following structural regularities: the long-term
relationship to energetics; the trend from a 'soft' rejection of wholism
and organicism towards a more concerted methodological individualism; the
movement from a diachronic to synchronic analysis; the heuristic role of
physics in providing both the primary metaphors and the mathematical
formalisms over time; the relative disengagement of empirical workers
within the discipline from the strictures of the core theory and the
failure to uncover any quantitative 'constants'; the hardcore insistence
upon the equilibrium concept (usually constrained optimization) by the
mid-20th century and some backpedalling from that commitment by the end of
the century; progressive blurring of any distinction between Nature and
Society; the withdrawal into arcane technical virtuousity in order to
assert the possibility of escape from the highly-charged political
character of the incompletely constituted subject-matter; but
simultaneously a history of individual and institutional accomodations to
state funding and demands to shape the research agenda; and increased
reliance upon computer simulations and information-processing metaphors as
we approach the present. Perhaps the most striking phenomenon to the
historian is the incongruous combination of assertions of arcane scientific
methodologies with the simultaneous lament that the field had "not quite
yet" achieved a stabilized body of concensual knowledge.
All of these regularities, it appears, might equally characterize
the history of ecology just as aptly as the history of orthodox economics.
Thus, when historians take note of some common language, such as
'competition' or 'consumption' or 'budgets' (Worster, 1994, p.293), they
have merely glimpsed the tip of the iceberg. Energy was not simply "the key
that opened the gate to the economic approach" (Worster, 1994, p.311); it
just paved over a footpath with a four-lane highway. I think it
particularly important to heed recent historians who insist that changing
notions of natural selection track simultaneous changes in notions of
physical dynamics (Depew & Weber, 1995); economists have similarly glanced
enviously at changing conceptions of dynamics, and have been notorious in
their attempts to co-opt various notions of selection and evolution for
their own purposes over the course of the century (Hodgson, 1994). But to
drive the parallels home, it seems that similarities extend even to
individual representative figures in the respective disciplines. Some
candidates for comparison are listed below.
Frederick Clements -- Karl Marx, Knapp
Historical climax community -- Historicist stage theories
Arthur Tansley -- Alfred Marshall
'ecosystem' ironic as a movement away from wholism and organicism
Thompson/ Volterra -- American Keynesians
cycle theories of populations -- business cycle theories
Eugene Odum -- Wassily Leontief
material cycles, energy flows -- input/output analysis
E.O.Wilson -- Milton Friedman
Marshallian representative agents -- ditto
Sociobiology -- evolution as optimum
Robert MacArthur -- Paul Samuelson
island biogeography mathematized -- representative agent math
operationist rhetoric -- ditto for revealed preference
co-opting stochastic math -- randomness tamed
Richard Lewontin -- John Roemer
wholist in orthodox idiom -- Marxist in orthodox idiom
John Maynard Smith --- Reinhard Selten
evolutionary stable strategies -- Nash equilibria
Chris Langton -- Ken Binmore
artificial life -- artificial agents
REFERENCES
Callebaut, Werner, ed. 1993. "Taking the Naturalistic Turn." Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Depew, David & Weber, Bruce. 1995. "Darwinism Evolving." Cambridge: MIT Press.
Hagen, Joel. 1992. "The Entangled Bank." New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press.
Kingsland, Sharon. 1985. "Modeling Nature." Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Levins, Richard & Lewontin, Richard. 1985. "The Dialectical Biologist."
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Martinez-Alier, Juan. 1987. "Ecological Economics." New York: Basil Blackwell.
Mirowski, Philip. 1989. "More Heat than Light." New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Mirowski, Philip. forthcoming 1996. "Machine Dreams: Economic Agent as
Cyborg" in History of Political Economy. Supplement to Volume 28.
Rizvi, Abu. 1994. "Game Theory to the Rescue?" Contributions to Political
Economy, (13):1-28.
Smith, John Maynard. 1982. "Evolution and the Theory of Games." Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Soule, M. & Lease, G. eds. 1995. "Reinventing Nature?" Washington: Island
Press.
Taylor, Peter. 1988. "Technocratic optimism, H.T.Odum and the Partial
Transformation of the Ecological Metaphor" Journal of the History of
Biology, (21):213-244.
Worster, Donald. 1994. "Nature's Economy." 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Worster, Donald. 1995. "Nature and the Disorder of History," in M.Soule &
G.Lease, eds. "Reinventing Nature?" Washington: Island Press.
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