Some time ago, I came across a new...
Some time ago, I came across a new branch of economics labelled “genoeconomics”. The advent of genoeconomics is obviously conditional on the emergence of big (genome-)data, since practical works in this field exploit huge data sets to precisely show that the value of genetic information for estimating educational or economic outcomes is next to nothing (see, for instance, here). While all this sounds rather idiosyncratic, the ‘innovative’ research field of genoeconomics is attracting interest, chairs and funds within mainstream economics. To be fair, the latter also features more sensible research incorporating slightly more inclusive frames on “nature vs. nurture” (e.g. here).
What I found most interesting in this context is that this development derives its conceptual legitimation from microfoundational underpinnings of mainstream economics, which features a dogmatic reductionist stance claiming that “only to reduce is to understand.” This underlying methodological rationale also applies to other cases, most prominently neuroeconomics, which now has been haunting the discipline for at least ten years. While neuroeconomics has established a firm stronghold within the profession, it obviously suffers from an additional drawback related to uncritically importing methods and findings from traditional neuroscience. Indeed, neuroscience is a strongly contested field with rather shaky empirical foundations. Hence, neuroscience is often confronted with far-reaching criticisms, which focus on the dubious role of industry in psychopharmacological research, the technological incompetence of neuroscience (currently available psychopharmacological drugs are based on ‘design by accident’, i.e. they are recycled maldevelopments from other fields of research) as well as empirical problems related to invalid measurement procedures and problems of confounding variables. A recent example for the latter is given here and it illustrates that many, if not most, of past findings relating Amygdala-activity to some behavior x or emotion y are invalid and due to an error relating to confounding Amygdala-activity with a rise in blood-pressure nearby the Amygdala. Given the size of the relevant literature this is a fantastic finding for science in general - and, at the same time, also a devastating finding for many scientific careers in particular.
It is quite true that the social sciences suffer from their notoriously imprecise character. However, if we turn to the allegedly more rigorous sciences to remedy that dilemma, we should first aim for a careful exploration whether these allegations of exactness and rigor are indeed correct. In the cases of neuroeconomics and genoeconomics this relatively trivial, but probably rather important, step seems to have been forgotten. In doing so economics added another episode of erecting suspicious theoretical edifice on imported foundations of allegedly solid origins .
Best,
Jakob