What Makes Economics the Dismal Science?

"In his 18th-century monograph "The Fable of The Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits," Bernard de Mandeville offered an economic model based on the vagaries induced by the offspring of human self-interest, identity and reflected self-appraisal: vanity, pride and avarice. During the Enlightenment, Mandeville's model was inherited by seminal thinkers in empiricism, economics and sociology, including David Hume, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson.

Given this intellectual history, Roland Fryer's declaration that "even the great economic thinkers hadn't incorporated identity . . . into a formal economic model" ("The Economics of Identity," op-ed, Oct. 8) is rather odd. The attributes of identity, self-interest and reflected self-appraisal, considered the basis for all social behavior, were essential to and explicit in the models of the great economic thinkers -- see Smith's "Theory of Moral Sentiments" and Hume's "Treatise on Human Nature."

Mr. Fryer might object that their models were qualitative, not explicitly mathematical or "formal." But all great thinkers know that not everything that counts can be counted. Given that the most important human attributes are inherently nonquantifiable (e.g., love, hate, envy, desire, beauty and identity), the most productive and stimulating models in the social sciences will be wholly qualitative, not quantitative or formal.

It may be attempts by modern social scientists to quantify the nonquantifiable, and measure the immeasurable, that explain both the oddity of Mr. Fryer's declaration and why economics continues to be a "dismal," and at times irrational, "science."

Edward Archer

Evansville, Ind." [1]

1. What Makes Economics the Dismal Science? Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 18 Oct 2024: A.14.