What would I do if I were a horse?

In Sabine Hossenfelder is WRONG About Capitalism, Unlearning Economics (UE) criticizes Hossenfelder for getting the history completely wrong. In order to explain money, she makes up a fantasy society that functions exactly like ours, except it doesn’t have money. That of course makes it very inconvenient to not have money, so it would be natural for them to invent money. This is basically a circular argument that doesn’t take history into account at all, how money actually came to be (UE refers to Debt: The first 5000 years by David Graeber)(sidenote: Everyday Anarchism has an excellent read-through series on Debt: https://www.everydayanarchism.com/david-graebers-debt/¹ ) and the many societies that didn’t have money, or used them in very different ways.

One interesting thing about this for me, is that UE is frustrated with why she is recounting this history that is demonstrably false and not used by economics anymore. He wonders if she maybe is quoting some 20-year old economics text book. This myth of barter is a well spread story, so it is not surprising that someone would tell it. That Hossenfelder does it mostly indicates that she was very lazy in her research.

An interesting detail here is that Hossenfelder is a physicist. This style of ahistorical explaining is very pedagogical in STEM where we mostly don’t care about history, at least when trying to explain how something works, rather than, for example, how some design or theory came to be. I think it often works well to teach how something technical works by starting from a basic set of principles, and then guide the students through how they could have invented by providing very helpful assumptions, questions, and lines of reasoning. That is what I did with Constraint Programming: Solving Hard Problems with Intelligent brute-force search. There I started with a problem, and through the foresight of already knowing how constraint programming works I guide the reader. I try one simple approach which runs into a problem. I then explain what the problem is, which hopefully prompts the reader to think about how to solve it. Then I present a way to solve that particular problem, and then explain how that runs into other new problems, at which point I go loop back to explain what those problems are. Repeat until I’ve explained everything I want to explain.

This works well I think because it motivates the technique while explaining what it is at the same time, while always keeping it to chunks of information of understandable size — but it is most likely inaccurate in terms of history. I have no idea how constraint programming was invented, nor did I set out to explain that. In fact, I think an approach that is faithful to history could be apedagogical in STEM. For example, the way I was taught linear algebra in university was through some form of historical narrative. We first started with how Gauss (I think) invented matrices as a formulaic way to solve a system of linear equations. The course then went on to build on top of that a lot, and then started to talk about some geometric interpretations of the theory we’ve built up so far. The problem is that these geometric interpretations are the reason why we care about linear algebra. As far as I can tell, we don’t actually give a shit about the method for solving linear equations. We care about vectors and matrices, not intersecting lines. Teaching linear algebra from the linear equations is just confusing and boring, whereas teaching it through the geometrical understanding motivates why we care about the field much quicker (which is what 3blue1brown does). For me anyway, the linear equations are just a historical curiosity and not a good place to start.

This is I think how Hossenfelder understands money, as a technical system that can be understood in isolation, separate from the messy human societies that it exists in.(sidenote: Relevant XKCD² ) If that was true, her approach to explaining money could have been good. But, alas, the myth of barter turns out to be an economics fanfiction without grounding in reality. Economics is not a natural science, no matter how much economics wish it were true. It is a social science, with all the messiness that includes — and reasoning about how people would behave from your armchair at home will most likely not work. History is important, how it actually happened is important to how it happened, as obvious as that sounds. Why did such an obviously wrong way of explaining the world end up in economics anyway, and why did it become so popular? My suspicion is that it is because too many economists like to think of themselves as STEM people that study fundamental laws of the universe. As the old saying goes: “If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’”