What is Economics Good For?
Head over to Truth on the Market and give Josh Wright’s post a read, in which he reacts to Anthony D’Amato’s latest wholesale attack on the usefulness of economics. I’m somewhat dismayed by this debate, partly because I very much like some of D’Amato’s work in international law, which — unlike his rants about economics — is subtle and well reasoned. He is one of the few non-continental thinkers who is familiar with the debate about the autopoiesis of law. I suspect that certain incorrect conclusions about the operational closure of social systems are responsible for D’Amato’s hostility towards economics. I, too, insist that economics can’t “overcome” or “replace” law in a naive (straw-man) realist’s sense but rather that the legal system decides autonomously and on the basis of legal criteria whether to assimilate and (in its own terms) re-render insights that the economic discourse provides. But that does not imply that economics is useless as such, which now seems to be D’Amato’s claim.
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