I have been questioning lately the idea of "science", especially with respect to the idea of "social science". Economics is supposedly a social science. The behavior of large groups is such that regularities and be observed, regularities that have seemingly antecedent causes and which can have predictable effects upon other groups. In a sense, then, economics becomes the study of a system, a system with observable regularities that can properly be called "laws": the law of demand, the law of supply, and such.
Where is free will if "laws" govern our behavior? Now the answer that I can feel coming back is that individuals have free will, we are talking about the interactions of large numbers of people. It is in those interactions that we see observable, regular behavior that can be labeled as "laws". However, do large numbers of people, societies, have a collective free-will or are societies locked into an economic way of acting described by economic theory? Can societies change or are societies merely subsets of economies?
Is economics all there is?
Pope John Paul II wrote, in Centesimus Annus:
The economy in fact is only one aspect and one dimension of the whole of human activity. If economic life is absolutized, if the production and consumption of goods become the center of social life and society's only value, not subject to any other value, the reason is to be found not so much in the economic system itself as in the fact that the entire sociocultural system, by ignoring the ethical and religious dimension, has been weakened, and ends by limiting itself to the production of goods and services alone. (section 39 of CA)
What is it to ignore the "ethical and religious dimension"? Has the entire sociocultural system been weakened? The argument is so often made that society is getting better the more we throw off the shackles of Christianity, and especially of Catholicism and Catholic thinking. If society can be studied as a subset set of the economy, indeed if microeconomics can be studied as a subset, or public choice theory as a subset, or any of the various sub-disciplines of economics can be studied in a manner comparable to studying Mars or Jupiter as a planet of the solar system, as "objects" which behave in a known or least discoverable manner, then there is no need for ethics or religion. Just study the events and look for repeated patterns which can be used to verify economic theory.
But what happens to the people in such a study? What happens to our freedom, our sense of self-determination? Are we truly just small, atomistic, independent agents carried along in a system of relations and behavior that shape us?
