Tuesday, January 20, 2026

Tony Lawson: The Nature and State of Modern Economics (minimal version)

Tony Lawson is a British economist. This post is 4 quotes from his book, Essays on: The Nature and State of Modern Economics (2015).

1. "Economics too has its more basic concerns. There include such matters such as social relations, collective practices, social positions, community, capitalism, money, corporations, technology, gender, rights obligations, human nature, care trust, crises, economy and so forth." (page 6)

2. "Firms, money, markets, institutions, social relations, even individual identities, cannot be experimentally isolated for each other." (page 16)

3. "Social reality is of a nature that is significantly at variance with the closed systems of isolated atoms that would guarantee the conditions of mathematical deductivist modelling." (page 112)

4. "Even if the ontology I defend is roughly right, there may yet be pockets of social reality that provide the appropriate conditions for successes when utilizing methods of formalistic modeling, as I regularly acknowledge." (page 210)

(original version from April 2018)