reductionism (revisited): Schumacher on economics and Smith on politics

Getting back to something I wrote this morning,

here's a quote from E.B. Schumacher (in his most famous book, Small Is Beautiful) on a problem with the field of economics:

The great majority of economists are still pursuing the absurd ideal of making their "science" as scientific and precise as physics; as if there were no qualitative differences between mindless atoms and men made in the image of God.


Of course, politicians make the same mistake, by implicitly reducing people to inert entities that will not respond to incentives (and the changed incentives that result from changes in public policy). Here's the famous "chess" quote from Adam Smith:

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.