BOOK OF THE DAY: ANTOIN E MURPHYreviews The Romantic Economistby Richard Bronk Cambridge University Press 382pp; £17.99
THIS IS a book of many homines. Homo economicus is presented and contrasted with homo sociologicus. Richard Bronk then introduces a new hybrid, homo economicus romanticus – the romantic economist. Bronk is quick to point out that such a hybrid may be seen as an oxymoron. Economists have had many adjectives associated with them ranging from dismal, to two-handed, to multi-handed, to brash, to arrogant, and so on into expletive territory. However, romantic is a prefix not known to its practitioners. Visions of a cavalier economist appearing at the gates of scarcity with a bunch of flowers and a box of chocolates to sweep a despairing consumer off her feet are alien to the profession. Incidentally, there is a portrait of Adam Smith with a bunch of posies in his hand. This was not a romantic Smith at work, but, a citizen of Glasgow concerned with warding off the malodorous airs produced by the primitive sanitation system.
Bronk defines romanticism as “a loose collection of philosophical beliefs and artistic creeds which celebrate the role of imagination, creativity and emotion”.
He proposes a joint venture between romanticism and economics which would allow for the incorporation of the romantic features of imagination and creativity into the economists' mindset. This is a tricky task because Bronk is a strong partisan of the romantic responses to "Enlightenment rationalism". However, he appears to be unaware that it was enlightenment rationalism that gave birth to modern economics when, in the early phase of the enlightenment, the French économistes led by Gournay, Quesnay, Turgot, Du Pont de Nemours and the Irish economist, Richard Cantillon, provided the basic structure which Smith would later synthesise in The Wealth of Nations.
The Romantic Economistis a useful book in pleading the case for greater interdisciplinarity between economics and the arts and social sciences and it provides a strong range of arguments for the further use of imagination by economists.
However, it should not have been confined to the romantics (Byron, Coleridge, Keats and Wordsworth are all abundantly quoted). The current state of the global economy is more reminiscent of a Beckettian habitat where shocked savers and investors, workers and entrepreneurs are wandering around wondering what has hit them as they gaze at the contours of mountainous toxic banking waste and closed-down factories.
Where to go and what to do? So far the economists have provided few answers. In part this has been due to the dominance of a North American-inspired model known as New Classical Macroeconomics – a model that Bronk needed to address in far greater detail. This model is based on assumptions that markets continuously clear and that people use rational expectations to analyse and solve the economic issues that they face. It is a model that is absolutely useless in the current environment; markets are not clearing and the evidence overwhelmingly shows the irrational production of bubbles in both the property and financial markets.
A new theory needs to be produced, but, pending its arrival, all economists can do is to grope for potential solutions through the reduction of interest rates and quantitative easing – a marvellous euphemism for printing money. It is not a matter of searching for romantic economists. What are needed are realistic economists who do not assume problems away by providing highly unrealistic abstractions of homo economicus.
Antoin E Murphy is an associate professor of economics in Trinity College Dublin. His latest book, The Genesis of Macroeconomics: New Ideas from Sir William Petty to Henry Thornton, has been recently published by Oxford University Press
