John B. Davis

Marquette University · Department of Economics

This paper investigates philosophy's engagement with one social science, economics, via the philosophy of economics. It first distinguishes mainstream philosophy of economics and heterodox/non-mainstream philosophy of economics, and then argues that the latter's increasing recourse to analytical reasoning in philosophy to advance its critiques of m...

This chapter discusses how philosophy could influence economists in the future. It emphasizes factors affecting economists' willingness to incorporate philosophical ideas in economics, and distinguishes a weak case and a strong case for them doing so. Both are tied to behavioral welfare economics' 'reconciliation problem' regarding the relationship...

Stratification economics (SE) investigates how economies are organized around group inequalities, especially by race and gender but also by ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, etc. Its historical origins and theoretical foundations have both a structural strand that addresses how and a social behavioral strand. SE's structural...

This paper discusses the difference between mainstream and heterodox economics in terms of philosophy's distinction between two types of temporal sequences governing events: the static, truth-tenseless before-after sequence and the dynamic, truth-tensed past-present-future sequence. Mainstream theory and optimization analysis employs the first. How...

The task given to me for this issue was to discuss the history, challenges, and accomplishments of the History of Economics Society (HES) as I see them from my vantage point as a past president. I frame my remarks in terms of changes I believe have occurred in how our field has been pursued in the society since I became involved.

The task given to me for this issue was to discuss the history, challenges, and accomplishments of the History of Economics Society (HES) as I see them from my vantage point as a past president. I frame my remarks in terms of changes I believe have occurred in how our field has been pursued in the Society since I became involved.

The book’s closing Chapter 9 on change in economics begins with an examination of the methodological problem of explaining what counts as change, and argues change in economics needs to be explained in terms of economics’ relationships to other disciplines. It argues that economics’ core–periphery structure works to insulate its core from other dis...

Mainstream economics assumes economic agents act and make decisions to maximize their utility. This model of economic behavior, based on rational choice theory, has come under increasing attack in economics because it does not accurately reflect the way people behave and reason. The shift towards a more realistic account of economic agents has been...

Chapter 5 turns to social embeddedness, describes this in terms of two kinds of social identities people have, and explains how a world stratified by social groups produces two kinds of shortfalls in the capability development of people in disadvantaged social groups. First, a microlevel mechanism, social group stigmatization, or social identity st...

Drawing on Putnam’s famous fact–value entanglement argument, Chapter 7 shows how economics is inescapably value-entangled, and argues that while economics is an inherently value-laden discipline it may still be an objective one. It describes economics’ value structure as being anchored by its main normative ideal shared across different approaches,...

Mainstream economics assumes economic agents act and make decisions to maximize their utility. This model of economic behavior, based on rational choice theory, has come under increasing attack in economics because it does not accurately reflect the way people behave and reason. The shift towards a more realistic account of economic agents has been...

Chapter 6 moves from combatting capability shortfalls to expanding people’s capability development through capability gains. In addition to promoting people’s basic capabilities for what they can be and do, we can also promote their potential enhanced capabilities when societies are democratic and reduce social inequality. I argue this calls for en...

Douglass North was central to the emergence of New Institutional Economics. Less well known are his later writings where he became interested in complexity theory. He attended the second economics complexity conference at the the Santa Fe Institute in 1996 on how the economy functions as a complex adaptive system, and in his 2005 Understanding the...

Mainstream economics assumes economic agents act and make decisions to maximize their utility. This model of economic behavior, based on rational choice theory, has come under increasing attack in economics because it does not accurately reflect the way people behave and reason. The shift towards a more realistic account of economic agents has been...

Abstract: This paper discusses Richard Arena’s insightful and original contributions to interpreting the important interaction between Piero Sraffa and Ludwig Wittgenstein. It discusses this in terms of dilemmas they each encountered in transitions in their thinking in the 1930s, emphasizes the influence of Sraffa’s unpublished “Surplus Product” te...

Douglass North was central to the emergence of New Institutional Economics. Less well known are his later writings where he became interested in complexity theory. He attended the second economics complexity conference at the the Santa Fe Institute in 1996 on how the economy functions as a complex adaptive system, and in his 2005 Understanding the...

Stratification economics (SE) investigates how economies are organized around group inequalities, especially by race and gender but also by ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, etc. Its historical origins and theoretical foundations have both a structural strand that addresses how and a social behavioral strand. SE’s structural...

Abstract: This paper discusses the difference between mainstream and heterodox economics in terms of philosophy’s distinction between two types of temporal sequences governing events: the static, truth-tenseless before-after sequence and the dynamic, truth-tensed past-present-future sequence. Mainstream theory and optimization analysis employs the...

We argue that in a core-periphery economic world economics imperialism as advanced by the postwar Chicago School and economic imperialism led by the economies of the north are two sides of the same coin. We first review the parallelism between postwar capitalism’s core-periphery expansion of the north into the south and the Chicago’s theory of econ...

The paper employs the sense and structure of a famous novel by the Italian writer Luigi Pirandello, One, No One and One Hundred Thousand (Uno, nessuno e centomila), of 1926, to reflect upon the recent past, current status, and possible future appearance of economics. From an open/closed system perspective, the paper explores economics in relation t...

ABSTRACT What are reflexive economic agents? Position-adjustment, SLAM, and self-organization John Davis Marquette University and University of Amsterdam If mainstream economics and its view of economic agents is designed for a world in which reflexivity and feedback processes in the economy are ‘tamed’ and predictable, how are we to understand e...

This paper addresses objectivity in economics. It criticizes a closed science, ‘view from nowhere’ conception of economics and defends an open science, ‘view from somewhere’ conception of objective science. It ascribes the first conception to mainstream economics, associates it with its principle practices – reductionist modeling, formalization, li...

Objectivity in economics and the problem of the individual This paper addresses objectivity in economics. It criticizes a closed science, ‘view from nowhere’ conception of economics and defends an open science, ‘view from somewhere’ conception of objective science. It ascribes the first conception to mainstream economics, associates it with its pr...

If mainstream economics and its view of economic agents is designed for a world in which reflexivity and feedback processes in the economy are ‘tamed’ and predictable, how are we to understand economic agents in a world in which reflexivity is ‘untamed’ and economies regularly exhibit unexpected fluctuations and significant nonlinearities? In a non...

Abstract: We argue that in a core-periphery economic world economics imperialism as advanced by the postwar Chicago School and economic imperialism led by the economies of the north are two sides of the same coin. We first review the parallelism between postwar capitalism’s core-periphery expansion of the north into the south and the Chicago’s theo...

This paper characterizes a pandemic as a kind of contagion, and describes a contagion as a two-level, two-direction, reflexive feedback loop system. In such a system, expert opinions for managing a pandemic can act as self-fulfilling prophecies due to how they influence collective belief formation. However, when multiple experts produce multiple ex...

This paper develops a general theory of social economic stratification based on the interconnection between a specific micro-level mechanism and a broad macro-level process. At the micro-level, it models stigmatization as selective social identity stigmatization; at the macro-level, it explains social exclusion using the club goods concept from the...

The meaning and significance of Keynes’s Treatise on Probability has changed over the 100 years since its publication. Initially it stood on its own as an original contribution to probability theory. After The General Theory some saw the Treatise strengthening Keynes’s later arguments. Yet by the time New Classical Economics became dominant it beca...

This paper characterizes a pandemic as one kind of contagion, and defines a contagion as a two-level, two-direction, reflexive feedback loop system. In such a system, experts’ opinions can act as self-fulfilling prophecies that significantly influence social behavior. Also, when multiple experts produce multiple, expert opinions can fragment a soci...

This chapter examines John Tomer’s contributions to our understanding of the concept of human capital. Tomer criticized the standard mainstream view of the concept as narrowly focused on education and training and as seeing investments in human capital as having “an individual, cognitive, and machine-like nature.” A broader concept included attenti...

This paper develops a general theory of socio-economic stratification based on the interconnection between a specific micro-level mechanism and a broad macro-level process. At the micro-level, it examines selective social identity stigmatization; at the macro-level it explains social exclusion using the goods taxonomy club goods concept. The paper...

The paper first discusses the methodological problem of identifying change in economics, given that change is always present in any discipline. It rejects ‘inventory’ methods that subjectively compare ‘new’ and ‘old’ concepts, and argues we should focus on economics’ disciplinary boundaries. To set out different possibilities for disciplinary inter...

As an interdisciplinary field, economics and ethics has been taught in many different ways, including in my experience teaching the course over many years. This paper describes the challenges teaching this subject involves and the strategy I ultimately adopted for doing so after trying different approaches. This strategy was meant to address the ne...

This paper reviews Sheila Dow’s contributions to open systems thinking as a form of methodological argument and as an important foundation for pluralism in economics. It reviews the origins of her thinking in connection with her distinction between Cartesian/Euclidian and Babylonian thinking in the history of economics, discusses the further develo...

As part of an article symposium on Partha Dasgupta and Sanjeev Goyal’s “Narrow Identities” (2019, Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics), John B. Davis reflects on the variety of social identities and the implications this variety has for social identity analysis.

In the article, we propose a general theoretical framework to distinguish a set of possible options for integration between social sciences. Adopting the so-called ‘nation’ metaphor in order to investigate relationships between disciplines, the framework uses an analogy with Dani Rodrik’s ‘world political trilemma’ (whereby democracy—here self-dete...

Piero Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (1960) was path-breaking as a contribution to political economy and penetrating as a critique of the orthodox economics of the twentieth century. As Ajit Sinha recently put it, the book produced a ‘revolution in economic theory’ (Sinha, A Revolution in Economic Theory: The Economics o...

This paper provides my reflections on the state of economic methodology and philosophy of economics as of the beginning of 2020 following the end of a fifteen year co-editorship of the Journal of Economic Methodology with Wade Hands. It looks at how economic methodology and philosophy of economics, as a meta-field type of research, has changed sinc...

This chapter develops a conception of reflexive economic agents as an alternative to the standard utility conception and explains individual identity in terms of how agents adjust to change in a self-organizing way, an idea developed from Herbert Simon. It seeks to model the behavior of economic agents in a manner that builds on the important contr...

Introduction to Symposium "Economics and its Boundaries"

This paper discusses how counterfactual thinking can be incorporated intobehavioral economics by relating it to a type of attribution substitution involved in choices people make in conditions of Knightian uncertainty. It draws on Byrne’s ‘rational imagination’ account of counterfactual thinking, evidence from cognitive science regarding the forms...

Abstract: This paper examines how attribute substitution (AS), central to the psychology of choice and behavioral economic reasoning, can be understood when combined with attention to counterfactual thinking (CFT), and how their combination creates important opportunities for the seeing heterodox economics as a single research program alternative t...

John Tomer’s Reconceptualization of the Concept of Human Capital John B. Davis, Marquette University and University of Amsterdam This chapter examines John Tomer’s contributions to our understanding of the concept of human capital. Tomer criticized the standard mainstream view of the concept as narrowly focused on education and training and as se...

This chapter explores the evolution and contribution of social economics to modern political economic analysis. It reviews the origins and early history of social economics, discusses more fully recent postwar social economics, and then identifies new themes in social economics’ current research agenda. Social economics is distinguished from classi...

This paper departs from the standard abstract economics approach to health economics to develop a specifically contextualist approach to the subject emphasizing social and historical circumstances affecting health provision. Following Polanyi, it sees the economy as socially embedded and economic relationships as social relationships. The paper cri...

This paper is a contribution to the Erasmus Journal of Economics and Philosophy symposium on Dasgupta and Goyal’s “Narrow Identities” (2019) that models how individuals develop social identities. They do not distinguish categorical and relational social identities, model only social group social identities, minimize intersectionality (having multip...

This chapter critically evaluates standard economics’ treatment of positive and normative, drawing on Putnam’s (2002) fact-value entanglement argument. It argues that economics is an inherently value-laden discipline but may still be an ‘objective’ one. The means of achieving this is to carry out a programme of value disentanglement that evaluates...

This paper departs from the standard abstract economics approach to health economics to develop a specifically contextualist approach to the subject emphasizing social and historical circumstances affecting health provision. Following Polanyi, it sees the economy as socially embedded and economic relationships as social relationships. The paper cri...

This paper aims to contribute to the analysis of expectations and belief reversals in a evolutionary and complexity economics framework. It formulates its analysis in terms of the concept of reflexivity, drawing on the ideas regarding reflexivity in financial markets of George Soros, and lays out a model of how a financial cycle expresses a systema...

The subject of this special issue of the Forum for Social Economics is ‘Identity, Institutions, and Power.’ As an introduction and as background for how the papers in the issue address this complex subject, I briefly discuss the contested status of concept of identity in economics. Just as economics as a whole is contested in regard to its theories...

Care is central to the human experience and part of the social provisioning process. Adam Smith recognised this, associating care with sympathy. Later contributions in the political economy tradition also provide scope for an analysis of care, but none as developed as Smith’s. With the emergence of the current mainstream, care is marginalised. Kenn...

This paper develops a conception of reflexive economic agents as an alternative to the standard utility conception, and explains individual identity in terms of how agents adjust to change in a self-organizing way, an idea developed from Herbert Simon. The paper distinguishes closed equilibrium and open process conceptions of the economy, and argue...

This paper develops a conception of reflexive economic agents as an alternative to the standard utility conception, and explains individual identity in terms of how agents adjust to change in a self-organizing way, an idea developed from Herbert Simon. The paper distinguishes closed equilibrium and open process conceptions of the economy, and argue...

This paper aims to contribute to the analysis of expectations and belief reversals in a evolutionary and complexity economics framework. It formulates its analysis in terms of the concept of reflexivity, drawing on the ideas regarding reflexivity in financial markets of George Soros, and lays out a model of how a financial cycle expresses a systema...

This paper provides my reflections on the state of economic methodology and philosophy of economics as of the beginning of 2020 following the end of a fifteen year co-editorship of the Journal of Economic Methodology with Wade Hands. It looks at how economic methodology and philosophy of economics, as a meta-field type of research, has changed sinc...

This paper discusses the impact of Sraffa's thinking on economics. It argues increasing specialization in research is producing an 'all trees, no forest' fragmentation of economics that creates opportunities for a return to concerns that motivated classical political economy. It associates this with a methodological conception of what a more plural...

Care is central to the human experience and part of the social provisioning process. Adam Smith recognized this, associating care with sympathy. Later contributions in the political economy tradition also provide scope for an analysis of care, but none as developed as Smith's. With the emergence of the current mainstream, care is marginalized. Kenn...

Stratification economics (SE) is an emergent subfield in economics, but its JEL classification misrepresents its content and its relationship to the whole of economics. This paper first develops a more accurate characterization of SE by identifying its differences with mainstream economics (ME), its commonalities with economics in a broad sense, an...

This paper uses a core-periphery distinction to characterize contemporary economics, economic methodology, and also today’s world economy. First, it applies the distinction to the organization of contemporary economics through an examination of the problem of explaining economics’ relations to and boundaries with other disciplines. Second, it argue...

This paper investigates whether specialisation in research is causing economics to become an increasingly fragmented and diverse discipline with a continually rising number of niche-based research programmes and a declining role for dominant cross-science research programmes. It opens by framing the issue in terms of centrifugal and centripetal for...

This paper uses a core-periphery distinction to characterize contemporary economics, economic methodology, and also today’s world economy. First, it applies the distinction to the organization of contemporary economics through an examination of the problem of explaining economics’ relations to and boundaries with other disciplines. Second, it argue...

Interview in Real-World Economics Review: John Davis is a well-respected and prolific heterodox economist, historian of economics, and philosopher/methodologist of economics. Over the years, his main critical interest has been the individual identity conception in economics (for example, Davis 2003, 2011). However, he has also written extensively...

This paper argues that agent-based modeling’s innovations in method developed in terms of simulation techniques also involve an improvement in economic methodology. It shows how Epstein’s generative science conception can be seen as departing from conventional methodological reasoning, and employs what I term an ‘open’ rather than ‘closed’ approach...

This short comment on Mark White’s comment on the relationship of economics and ethics focuses on the nature of economics and ethics as an emergent field of investigation. It discusses different types of between-discipline fields, and compares crossdisciplinary and transdisciplinary interpretations of economics and ethics. The ‘domestication’ thesi...

The paper presents the topic modeling technique known as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a form of text-mining aiming at discovering the hidden (latent) thematic structure in large archives of documents. By applying LDA to the full text of the economics articles stored in the JSTOR database, we show how to construct a map of the discipline over...

This article uses George Soros’ theory of boom–bust cycles to argue that mainstream economics, as built on Samuelson’s Foundations, followed a similar boom-bust cycle. It underwent a reflexive, positive feedback pattern of development before 1980 followed by a reflexive, negative feedback pattern of development after 1980, making it a science bubbl...

The analytical approach of standard health economics has so far failed to sufficiently account for the nature of care. This has important ramifications for the analysis and valuation of care, and therefore for the pattern of health and medical care provision. This book sets out an alternative approach, which places care at the center of an economic...

This paper explains the continuing relevance of Keynes's philosophical thinking in terms of his anticipation of complexity thinking in economics. It argues that that reflexivity is a central feature of the philosophical foundations of complexity theory, and shows that Keynes employed an understanding of reflexivity in both his philosophical and eco...