Cogs and Monsters by Coyle Diane;

Author:Coyle, Diane;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-07-08T00:00:00+00:00

For anybody interested in public policy there is a fundamental question, all too rarely explicitly addressed: what does it mean for policy to make things better? What is the outcome the policy is supposed to achieve, and what would make any particular outcome better than another? This can be answered in relatively narrow terms: competition policy should increase or maintain competition; monetary policy should achieve stable inflation; and so on. But that just puts the question at one remove by assuming these narrow goals are the appropriate ones. How do these make society as a whole better off, and how can we tell?

In economics—always so central to public policy debates—machine metaphors are deeply embedded in our language and thinking (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). In the twentieth century this was taken literally enough that the Phillips Machine, of which there are a few left (Figure 2), was taken to represent the economy as a whole, literally mechanical relationships of pipes and cogs. How naïve we were to think this was an adequate model of the economy. We know better now, with (metaphorical) models incorporating uncertainty, frictions, expectations, shocks, behavioural biases. Yet the machine metaphor is still deeply embedded in economic policy. We speak of policy levers, of linkages, of cause and effect. When asked to reflect on their discipline, economists often reach for comparisons with engineers (Roth 2002) or plumbers (Duflo 2017).

FIGURE 2. The Phillips Machine, Author’s photo, Meade Room, Faculty of Economics, Cambridge

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