Why Economists should Choose their Inheritance: Physics and Path-independence in Economic Systems

This paper argues that economists would be well advised to do the work that Jacques Derrida calls 'choosing one's inheritance'. This fundamental task, which every heir must undertake, consists essentially of responding to a twofold and contradictory injunction: reasserting a past that the heir did not choose; and reinterpreting and transforming this past through a process of critical rewriting. We argue that this task, particularly the work of critical selection and rewriting, is too often neglected in economics. The fact that the property of path-independence is embedded in the great majority of economic models serves as an illustration of this negligence. Because of their desire to emulate the natural sciences, the neoclassical 'founding fathers' of modern economics bequeathed to their successors this essential property of the physics of their time. A consequence of this inheritance, coupled with the neglect of critical selection and rewriting by economists, is that the properties of path-independent systems - homeostasis and time-reversibility - continue to thrive in the great majority of economic models.