Econ Art: Divorcing Art from Science in Modern Economics

This work examines economics using art history as a starting point. Historians of economic thought have long recognized the possibility that the "science" of economics owes more to cultural influences than is usually admitted. The book offers a study of this contradiction, highlighting the cultural and aesthetic influences of surrealism, cubism and abstract art on both economic theory and method in the 20th century. Arguing that economics has developed more as an art form than as a science, the author looks not only at what economists have produced but how they have produced it, uncovering the cultural preconceptions which have shaped economic theory and method in the last 100 years. He argues that the time is ripe to embarrass the profession into a whole-sale reconsideration of what economics is for, how it should be done and what might make it better and more useful to the academy and to the world at large.