Answer to Question #164117 in Philosophy for Samantha

Question

Is it convincing that modern economics is mechanistic?

Answer 1

The modern economics is not entirely mechanistic. The economy is characterized by increasing complexities, many traditional economic explanatory models have increasingly lost their persuasive power. For a long time, economics was subordinate to the influence of mechanistic worldview. For instance, applied to models whose trajectories tend towards equilibrium and seem to be predictable and tangible with the assistance of partial analyses. The highly dynamic world economic fluctuation patterns have a strong contrast with the current economic toolbox. The positive attempt to substitute for the traditional method a theory of games is still too recent to permit a final verdict. The mechanistic approach is unpredictable.

The inflation problems in the 1970s demonstrated that these mechanistic concepts do not work or they only work for a short time. The failure of the mechanistic regulation approach in the former Eastern bloc countries, whose centrally controlled economic systems collapsed in the 1990s, proved to be significantly more serious. Thus, the theoretically justified breakdown of Laplace’s worldview and the empirical findings in economics call the mathematical-mechanistic way of thinking as well as economic sciences in general into question.