Classical Mechanics With An Ethical Dimension: Professor Tinhergen’s Economics

This article is an attempt to present and assess Professor Jan Tinbergen’s influential work in economics. It is inspired by the controversy between John M. Keynes and Jan Tinbergen conducted in the Economic Journal over half a century ago. [Keynes 1939, 1940; Tinbergen 1940]. The key issue in the discussion was how far economic phenomena were quantifiable and representable in invariant empirical relationships. For the writing of the article at hand, this author had an additional spur: he was himself a victim of Tinbergen’s verdict that economics must quantify in order to be scientific1. The disagreement between Keynes and Tinbergen was fundamental, but in view of the intellectual monoculture prevailing since World War II, economists considered a discussion of this sort to be increasingly unnecessary and irrelevant. However, in recent years there has been a change in the wind. On the one hand, there is increasing dissatisfaction with the paradigmatic foundations of contemporary economics, and on the other, there have been scientific advances in physics, which constitutes a major paradigmatic basis of conventional economics. This article assesses the foundations of Tinbergen’s work in view of some of the changes in the natural sciences.