Economics Is a Serious Subject (ESS):Fact and Value: Science and Ideology

In 1932, having delivered the manuscript for EIC, Robinson wrote a pamphlet exploring the methods of economists, classifying her colleagues according to their approaches. Her pamphlet, Economics Is a Serious Subject: The Apologia of an Economist to the Mathematician, the Scientist and the Plain Man (Robinson 1932), was not written for academic recognition but more for provocation and a broader audience. Robinson’s absorption of the seductive language and structure of the local logical positivists was consistent with an equally pervasive faith in the primacy of science in advancing knowledge and the subordinate, subjectivity of research with political or ideological connections. The issue of whether economics was value based was a stock question at this time. Robinson sought to bring the two aspects of knowledge together, while maintaining a distinction between ‘facts’ and ‘values’ (ibid.: 4).

As she saw it, economic problems generally take the form of ‘facts’. Facts were consistent with axiomatic assumptions. Such objectivity enabled political economy to be ‘scientific’. Values and ideology introduced the formless role of the subjective. All economic theory implied some method, but it was at the time taken to be uncontroversial. Robinson, however, was considering the implications for economic theory of its method, recognising how any economic theory, in this case neoclassical partial equilibrium theory, was developed within the structures pre-empted by its method. Furthermore, questions can also arise out of the theory itself. ‘Perfect competition’ was a contemporary example. Perfect competition was clearly an analytical device, but if it were replaced by imperfect market features and rules, what were the results?

Her method, at this stage, was to examine the assumptions used to characterise a real situation, classifying these as either real or analytically tractable, with an apparent trade-off between the two.^[1] The economist will reveal their ideological slant in their choice of assumptions. If this ideological presence could be contained in the assumptions, the actual logical theorising could be value-free, potentially ‘scientific’. For Robinson in the 1930s, the adequacy of a theory thereby became a matter of the realism of its assumptions and the logical coherence of its arguments based on these assumptions and the appropriateness of the method for the required aim.

Science can prescribe various forms, or methods, requiring precisely defined concepts and ways of representing them. Statistical studies and mathematical models were, and are still, the most commonly used in economics. Robinson did not dismiss mathematical arguments; indeed, she recognised a role for this method; most of her own work was in the form of highly simplified (sic) deductive models using abstract concepts. Her own mathematical limits may have discouraged her from exploring problems along this route, and, besides, with a scope limited by the degree of abstraction necessary for this type of formal logic, mathematics may not have been suitable for her uses. On the other hand, she relied on statistical results from empirical studies by trusted others for many of her purposes. The very establishment of the problem itself entailed choosing concepts which could represent the actual issue meaningfully and measurably. With this objective, statistical work could be confirming a framework and its relevance. It was the ill-considered adoption of mathematics and statistics to understand everything that she was and remained wary of. This includes attempts to criticise her analytical arguments by empirical and statistical methods, which have missed the point of her advice to readers to be cautious against interpreting logical-time models as being applicable to actual situations. She makes this clear: ‘Certainly it is not legitimate to set up a highly abstract model and then draw from it conclusions applicable to actual problems’ (Robinson 1962a: Preface). Remarks about assumptions, values, and methods appear throughout her work and are a particular subject for discussion in her more wide-reaching books of Robinson (1962b, 1966a, 1970, 1971), a period during which the abstract concepts being used by her antagonists seemed particularly problematic.

• [1] The apparent trade-off reappears as, or was suggestive of, a later decision, post-war, between having thestatus of science and having a relevant theory when Robinson was coming round more to the view of aninseparability of values from ‘scientific’ endeavours.