Virtually all large-scale damage to the global environment is caused by economic activities, and the vast majority of economic planners in both business and government coordinate these activities on the basis of guidelines and prescriptions from neoclassical economic theory. In this hard-hitting book, Robert Nadeau demonstrates that the claim that neoclassical economics is a science comparable to the physical sciences is totally bogus and that our failure to recognize and deal with this fact constitutes the greatest single barrier to the timely resolution of the crisis in the global environment.
Neoclassical economic theory is premised on the belief that the "invisible hand"— Adam Smith's metaphor for forces associated with the operation of the "natural laws of economics"—regulates the workings of market economies. Nadeau reveals that Smith's understanding of these laws was predicated on assumptions from eighteenth-century metaphysics and that the creators of neoclassical economics incorporated this view of the "lawful" mechanisms of free-market systems into a mathematical formalism borrowed wholesale from mid-nineteenth-century physics. The strategy used by these economists, all of whom had been trained as engineers, was as simple as it was absurd—they substituted economic variables for the physical variables in the equations of this physics. Strangely enough, this claim was widely accepted and the fact that neoclassical economics originated in a bastardization of mid-nineteenth-century physics was soon forgotten.
Nadeau makes a convincing case that the myth that neoclassical economic theory is a science has blinded us to the fact that there is absolutely no basis in this theory for accounting for the environmental impacts of economic activities or for positing viable economic solutions to environmental problems. The unfortunate result is that the manner in which we are now coordinating global economic activities is a program for ecological disaster, and we may soon arrive at the point where massive changes in the global environment will threaten the lives of billions of people. To avoid this prospect, Nadeau argues that we must develop and implement an environmentally responsible economic theory and describes how this can be accomplished.
Robert Nadeau is an interdisciplinary scholar and an historian of science and is currently a professor at George Mason University. His books include The Non-Local Universe: The New Physics and Matters of the Mind; The Conscious Universe: Parts and Wholes in Physical Reality; and S/He Brain: Science, Sexual Politics, and the Myths of Feminism. He lives in Fairfax, VA.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1. Spaceship Earth: Homo economicus and the Environmental Crisis 2. The Not So Worldly Philosophers: Metaphysics, Newtonian Physics, and Classical Economics 3. The Emperor Has No Clothes: The Neoclassical Economists and Mid-Nineteenth Century Physics 4. No Free Lunch: Mainstream Economics and Globalization 5. A Green Thumb on the Invisible Hand: Environmental Economics 6. Schisms, Heresies, and Keeping the Faith: Ecological Economics 7. The Real Economy in Biology: Emergence and a New View of Order 8. The Real Economy in Physics: Cosmic Connections 9. Toward a New Theory of Economics: The Costs of Doing Business in the Global Environment 10. The Ceremony of Innocence: Science, Ethics, and the Environmental Crisis
What People are Saying About This
Garrett Hardin
Just as the drawing together of the disciplines of biology and chemistry created a much needed hybrid science (biochemistry) a century ago, so (I think) will the needed joining of economics with biological ecology make a more powerful compound discipline. The Wealth of Nature promises to be a major force in this direction.
— Garrett Hardin, author of "The Tragedy of the Commons"
Herman E. Daly
The big idea that unifies this intellectual history of modern economics is the problem of the Whole and the Part. Nadeau shows why mainstream neoclassical economics has gotten it wrong and how dissident ecological economists are getting it right. Clues to the right relation of Whole and Part are discovered in modern biology and physics, but neoclassical economists are still mired in weak analogies from nineteenth-century physics. An important book on a critical issue!
