================= HES POSTING ======================= 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. ============== FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============== For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]