Economists are well-practiced in their rejections of any possibilities for objective demonstrations of economic principles in action. This genre has received its most extensive development by the Austrian school:

Austrians such as Mises and Hayek replied that the disciplines of human action are not like the physical sciences. In human affairs, there are no laboratories where variables can be controlled and theories tested, while (unlike the physical sciences) there are no quantitative constants in a world where there is consciousness, freedom of will, and freedom to adopt values and goals and then to change them. These Austrian contentions were dismissed by neoclassicals as simply posing a greater degree of difficulty in arriving at the human sciences, but not in offering a troublesome difference in kind.¹

Mathematics and game theory, whether new or old, is by definition unable to capture the knowledge-related actions that billions of human actors under the conditions of the global market economy carry out. The problem is complexity. When we fully contemplate the task of building an image of the pure market economy, we recognize that it contains a degree of complexity that is unfathomable.²

But are economics’ defining general negatives offered in the scientific spirit of inviting disproof by counterexample? Do any members of the economics guild sincerely acknowledge the possibility of a non-Euclidean economics? Or do their findings as to the limits of human cognition amount to nothing more than a self-aggrandizing claim to authority over material affairs that they have no intention of ever relinquishing?

Pseudo-science is ever the servant of tyranny because, absent objective demonstrata of cause and effect, the authority of science can be conferred on any of a great many conflicting policies having no benefit other than to those in charge. Typical economic discourse invites these maladies: some presumably causal system by which prices and the distribution of assets might be determined is introduced; and this system is then defended as preeminent in its abstraction of THE ECONOMY, rather than as the objectively best instrument with which to elucidate a given issue. So situated, tellers of economic truth have as much difficulty being wrong as they have in being right; and their theoretical discourse is properly observed as occurring in scholastic tones.

SFEcon, being offered as a prospective counterexample to such practice, is naturally hopeful that some reconsideration on economics’ confounding general negatives might be possible. First, let us accept that a great many huge and complicated epiphenomena are well-understood because their analogs have been operated under laboratory conditions. For example:

San Francisco’s hydrological basin covers some 2500 square miles. It is fed and drained by thousands of miles of rivers; and these inland flows are alternately reinforced and resisted by the tides and currents of the planet’s largest ocean. Clearly, no laboratory can accommodate such a vast system.

But this system is quite well understood in terms of, for example, the tidal vectors that occur at any point in San Francisco Bay at any time relative to the tidal cycle, or the dispersal patterns for pollutants released anywhere in the system, etc., etc.

These matters have been established because a 1.5 acre scale model of the bay has been operated by the US Army’s Corps of Engineers since World War II. This physical analog mimics the Bay Area’s topology so as to realistically model the dynamics of fluid flows within it.

And, considering that the development of the universe itself has useful mathematical analogs that are functionally no different than kinetic videogames, it would seem that the neoclassicals could well have been correct in that economic causality simply pos[es] a greater degree of difficulty and not a troublesome difference in kind. Given the number of hyper-complex systems for which physical and mathematical analogs already exist, it is ridiculous to foreclose the possibility that economics’ particular degree of complexity will be (or, perhaps, has already been) fathomed.

Attribution of a difference in kind to human beings’ consciousness, freedom of will, and freedom to adopt values and goals should be equally suspect in that no such qualities inhere with the many insect species that have been creating vast, complex, and somehow stable macroeconomies for thousands of millennia. We can readily accept that beings lacking a human consciousness have no freedom to alter their values and goals; but are these not the boundaries of economic activity rather than the activity itself? This distinction is critical because scientific models should be indifferent as to whether they interpret the activity following fixed or changeable boundary conditions.