an article was published in the New York Times a couple of days ago about the new specialty of "neuroeconomics".
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/17/science/17NEUR.html
It is described as a "revolution" in economics, and should go a long way towards addressing the reservations which have been expressed in many quarters about the scientific underpinnings of economics and the validity of its prevailing theories and methodologies. This would seem to be relevant to political science because these methodologie appear to have invaded the discipline.
I think it is true that empirical, almost naive, experimental developments, are undermining the previous "scientific" paradigm. This journalistic article shows some of the mounting evidence.
Whether the term "neuro-economics" will catch on as more than a fashion is hard to say. But the field sounds as if it will attract growing research funding.
What I suggest is happening is that a number of developments are undermining the assumption that economic behaviour can be modelled with a simple model that all economic actors are rational people.
This is undermining the ideological assumption imposed by capitalism by way of a model of eternal human nature, that everyone acts like an atomised individual, who is the counterpart of the atomised commodity, which is the basis of the capitalist mode of production.
In fact however just as the commodity contains a fetishistic power - the social context in which it was produced and in which it will contribute, so do humans all act within a social context, partly unconsciously, partly consciously.
Part of the new empirical studies are based on new techniques of brain imaging, which are enormously crude, but essentially demonstrate that all parts of the brain are interconnected, which makes sense since in external reality everything is connected with everything else.
The average number of neurones that feed excitatory or inhibitory impulses into another neurone is of the order of 1000. With roughly 10^11 neurones in the human brain, the number of synapses is of the order of 10^14.
It is quite impossible to assume that cognitive processes have evolved in the human brain separately from emotional processes.
These brain imaging studies give conformation of what market researchers know about subjective emotional factors in economic activity.
Brain imaging studies have been used now to correlate with models of increasingly sophisticated games. These games have gone beyond the prisoner's dilemma. The game reported in this article is particularly interesting because it can only be explained by arguing that human beings in their economic activity are motivated by non-selfish collective responses as well as self interested ones.
While the article talks knowledgeably about individual neuro-transmitters, and neurological structures, dopamine is only one of one thousand neuro-transmitters in the human brain. All these neurones and neurotransmitters of course feed back on each other and modulate each other. Any simply rectilinear model of psychological causation is likely to be facile nonsense. The brain, like the mind, like economics, like society, is a complex self-organising dynamical system.
Marx
Although Marx of course did not have neuro-imaging techniques or computerised modelling, I suggest this incipient revolution is by no means incompatible with the assumptions in his critique of capitalist political economy.
Note, briefly, that in the comments on the architect and the bee, (Chapter 7 para 2 Capital Vol I) he insists on the role of imagination in commodity production. And while he does not spell it out at that point, the worker not only has to create the use object for exchange but must also imagine the likely market for the use value that is being created.
Further, some of Marx's remarks are compatible with aspects of emerging evolutionary psychology, (although not the simplistic version which essentially tries to argue that the evils of capitalist society are determined for ever in our genes).
Marx insists that man is a social animal:
"man is, if not as Aristotle contends, a political, at all events, a social animal" (Chapter 13 para 8 Capital 1). The footnote at this point observes, "Strictly, Aristotle's definition is that man is by nature a town-citizen. This is quite as characteristic of ancient classical society as Franklin's definition of man, as a tool-making animal, is characteristic of Yankeedom."
In a footnote at the beginning of Chapter 24 Section 5, Marx denounces Bentham as an arch-Philistine, and a "purely English phenomenon" (just to be impartial). He writes here about human nature: "To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog-nature. This nature itself is not to be deduced from the principle of human utility. [Bentham's reductionist simplification]. Applying this to man, he that would criticise all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch."
I suggest that the empirical research described in this NYT article points to an incipient paradigm shift away from the reductionist model that human beings behave in economics as capitalist ideology claims. Because of its idolatry of empiricism it will be hard for the prophets of capitalism to withstand the corrosive effect of what looks like a growing field of empirical research.
This is beneficial to the wider aims of the marxist perspective that economic activity is social activity, although aspects of it are not always consciously perceived as such, and that money is a social relationship.
Chris Burford London
