The Dark Arts of Economics

Introduction

This piece is a collection of three essays written as responses to Doughnut Economics author Kate Raworth’s 8th Way of Thinking Competition, which sort audio, visual and written presentations of new ideas for the economics discipline. The winners of this competition have yet to be announced.

If the three essays I have written for this competition share a common theme, it is this: what can economics, and economists, know? To an extent, our need to know things which can’t be known leads to creation — what I call economic alchemy — in the form of utility functions, as well as false evaluations of the world which leads one to invoke the late Mark Twain, as is the case in Fortune Tellers. All of this, of course, also demands we know what we’re trying to know; that we understand the structure of reality and the world we’re trying to study. This question is the topic of The Illusionists.

I have contemplated fleshing out these pieces into what I would consider meatier — and hopefully more compelling — articles, and/or weaving a direct narrative from one of these so-called dark arts to another, but ultimately, I have decided against it. The Alchemists is a stand-alone defence of some economic rationale while embracing a pluralist approach. Fortune Tellers is, at the very least, a brief introduction to Knightian uncertainty and the…