Philip Pilkington
| Author | Philip Pilkington |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Nonfiction |
| Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan |
|
Publication date
|
2016 |
| Media type | Print Paperback |
| Pages | 358 |
The Reformation in Economics is a book written by the Irish economist Philip Pilkington. It is a book that aims to deconstruct contemporary neoclassical economic theory in order to determine to what extent it is scientific and to what extent it is ideological. The book is divided into three sections: Ideology and Methodology, Stripped-Down Macroeconomics and Approaching the Real World. The first section of the book engages in a deconstruction of economic theory that seeks to weed out the ideological elements of economic theory while introducing a coherent methodology that allows for the reconstruction that follows. The second section lays out a theory of the macroeconomy that builds on the methodology described in the first section and tackles: money, prices, profits, income distribution, income determination, investment and finance. The final section sketches out how such a theory should be applied to real-world empirical data, with a particular emphasis on the fact that working economists are faced with fundamental uncertainty and so applying their theories is not as simple or straightforward as applying theories in the hard sciences, like physics.
The author considers a lot of contemporary neoclassical economic theory to be ideology. In an article that accompanied the release of the book he compared neoclassical economics to the 19th century ideological pseudoscience of phrenology:
"What made phrenology so popular was what also made economics so popular at the time: it gave a rationale for a society based on Progress and also provided a blueprint for how this could be achieved. The phrenological doctrine, being so vague in its pronouncements, was highly malleable and could be used to justify whatever those in power needed justifying. So, for example, in 19th century England phrenology was used to justify laissez faire economic policies by emphasising unequal natural capacities amongst the population while in early 20th century Belgian Rwanda it was used to justify the supposed superiority of the Tutsis over the Hutus. In my book The Reformation in Economics I take the position that modern economics is more similar to phrenology than it is to, say, physics."
The book seeks to show that much of the ideology in economics is due to microeconomics and attempts made by economists to try to understand the behaviour of individuals based on fixed and unchanging laws. Pilkington argues that only macroeconomics, which deals with large aggregates of people, can allow for the abstraction necessary to generate scientific statements about the economics.
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