Why We Should Consider Economics As Discovery

“Everything started to go downhill once Newton invented gravity in 1665”

It’s definitely one of the worst dad jokes to date and you’ve probably heard it a million times. Incidentally though, as a kid I somehow managed to learn the joke before I really knew the difference between invention and discovery, leading me to misuse it unironically for far too long. I even remember getting back a ninth grade bio test where I realized I had written several paragraphs about Gregory Mendel inventing pea sex.

Now, the difference between the two can actually be quite an interesting distinction to delve into, and have resulted in some pretty strong opinions for mathematicians or other academics over the past few centuries. It can mean the difference between an idea being taught in school as established truth or just theory. Though for the most part, the collective agreement seems to be that research becomes gilded as ‘discovery’ when it reveals something about the natural world, and goes on without humans needing to produce any ideology around it, while ‘invention’ is a uniquely human creation through an innovative process. This is why Newton discovered gravity while Benz invented the engine.

One realm of thought where we really don’t see this discussion taking place is in the field of economics. This is probably due to the fact that economics is a social science–written by humans, about humans, a product of human civilization, and a product of human worldviews. And as we’ve just stated, ‘discovery’ is strictly about things that can exist in the first place without our attached ideology. So what’s the big deal? Well, one trend I’ve noticed among economist authors is to harp on the universality, or fundamentality, of their subject matter–and often they can be pretty convincing. Humans are definitely not the sole species to ever experience scarcity, or even to follow laws of supply and demand; any migrating animal does so too. The word ‘economize’ has been applied to functions describing pressure, or mass distribution. Renowned philosopher Alan Fiske even categorizes ‘social market pricing’ as one of the basic moral patterns we follow as humans. And as I’ll get to later, I propose that this philosophical lens does a world of good for the discipline of economics.

A Classification

But before going further, it’s important to map out a truer definition of what the distinction really means. Here are some examples from different fields where things are a little more clear cut:

• A new species - A pretty pure example for a discovery. It even has the ‘feeling’ of it baked in there.

• The computer - The standard hallmark of an invention, also somewhat of a cultural cliche.

• The Fibonacci sequence in nature - For those who don’t remember, this originated as a mathematical problem exploring different number groups, actually first used to breed rabbits. You get it from adding one number to the previous: (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13…) and incidentally, it shows up everywhere in nature from flower petals, sea shells, our lungs, even the milky way’s composition. I’d definitely define this as a discovery, as the pattern exists outside of human interface, even if we do need some conceptualizing to grasp it.

• The Hero’s Journey–This was first spoken about by Joseph Cambell when he came to the realization that almost all mythological stories followed an incredibly similar narrative structure, across different cultures and time periods. And while slightly contested, I’m more attracted to the idea that this falls under ‘discovery’ also, just from its tendency to be so baked into conscious development.

• Long Division - Forever hated, never used past 5th grade, and in my mind, an invention. One could possibly argue that division itself is fundamental on a small scale, like with cell splitting during meiosis, but a construct of unnaturally large integers, with a set method and remainder seems to be a very human thing. Same goes for the models we draw of atoms, calculators, or even counting ‘base ten’. It’s interesting how the small things can be less fundamental than the big things, I even came across an argument recently that vector spaces are so much richer and grounded in reality than integers ever will be.

• Pop music - most artistic things in the cultural context are inventions, which I think we should be proud in taking credit for. A chord progression, or method of painting, or fashion brand are all intrinsically human, and in the context of this essay it’s what we can bring into the world in a really unique way

So, how does this bring us closer to an exact definition? Perhaps a better distinction than the one we had before might be of ‘background’ and ‘foreground’. Discovery tends towards the past, towards the natural world, as abstractive and structural. Invention is at front stage with the future, methodology and the means of doing things, and overall pretty cultural - more active than passive. Also, staging the definition this way actually points to some similar systems that we already have, for example the means -> conclusion distinction is in some ways similar to the scientific method. Starting with a hypothesis, it in turn leads to a series of tests, experimentation, and analysis before actually coming to discovering a fact about the natural world. Discovery acts as background and conclusion, invention acts as foreground and a means to some end.

Turning back to Economics, we can now see that how we define our ideological advances can actually mean quite a lot about the field. Of course there are a lot of sections to cover and some are very obvious–Economic history majors do historical discoveries while accountants invent new accounting methods. What’s much more interesting to consider are the theoretical claims, things like the Laffer Curve, Modern Monetary Theory, or Pareto efficiency. It’s interesting because all of these things, as well as anything else in economics, are hotly contested–giving another edge to the question of whether they could graduate to fundamental truths about nature. One thing that does seem to reach this threshold though is market equilibrium–it has the visceral aspect of feeling solved, and a majority of the time will magically come to the right solution without any computational power. Effortlessness may therefore also be a guiding factor when it comes to discovering natural laws.

It’s so incredibly enticing to see all these textbook concepts as empirically true, it might mean the difference between studying economics as just a collection of human theories versus as a hard science. It also points to the possibility that economics is radically linked to its different fields, that macro and micro might come from the same generative ‘strain’ rather than being only generally linked–not unlike a grand unified theory of physics.

A Sense of Place

It’s at this point where we can start to venture into the idea of platonic worlds. Many readers may know this from the Cave Allegory–the basic thought is that, correlating to each existing object is an ideal form of it, somewhere. For each given rabbit in the world there is some ‘CAD rendering’ of it, or seed of existence, that makes it what it is. There have also been a hundred variations on the idea, such as Kant’s A priori, but all relatively point back to the same thing.

In this context, the most exciting thing for me is that sense of place where these ideological forms exist - and the realization that there is a seemingly infinite amount of ‘things out there’ to discover. (Even if we didn’t know about rabbits, their platonic identity would still exist). It’s even better that they would structurally relate to each other, and that there is an ideological whole to eventually grasp. To return to Newton, he once related his feelings about the subject like this: “To myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

This is a beautiful thought, and the hidden reality that he implies is tantalizing. It may be slightly easier to see in the context of mathematics, where things are often processed as very abstract before they come to have real world applications–in economics, we don’t do much of this, except at the very academic level, and thinkers there often get criticized for losing touch with reality. At surface level it doesn't seem like there is much we can even do with economics besides making sure everything goes well. Potential GDP marks a hard symbolic line of perfect optimization and it's usually said that innovation is the only thing able to better our wellbeing after we’ve adequately economized to a point.

Economics is incredibly young though, only beginning as a discipline in the late 18th century. We just talked about how it is usually defined as a means (Invention) and very rarely a discovery in itself, but almost all scientific fields today originated in just the same way. Math for centuries upon centuries was used for counting crops while ‘biology’ was studied for the sake of farming better. The transformation this calls for is turning “What can we do with economics” from a menial question into one of the utmost importance, just as math has become something much more than its origins in a means to and end as well.

The Real World

It might be useful to provide some ‘discovery driven’ examples. Game Theory, as it is called today, originated in the 1920’s by the work of John Von Neuman. His work mainly focused on the study of zero sum games, but in general the branch focuses on things like monopolies, how business price match, or even the habits of consumers. And the name is appetizing for a reason–the way people research it are through puzzles or thought experiments. (If you’ve heard of the prisoner’s dilemma, this is where it stems from). Point is that Game Theory has been able to contribute to incredibly important realizations, meanwhile all its conclusions are fundamental phenomena that happen naturally. There’s no way to buy or sell its advancements if everybody is free to study the field, and its conclusions will be the same today as in a thousand years from now. And it’s exactly this type of work in economics that can build on top of itself theoretically while still applying to the real world.

Another example has actually come from the reverse, where studies of systems in other fields have been applied to looking at markets. It ranges from looking at cell growth patterns, to the internet, to atmospheric shifts, all helping understand the abstract view of how we buy and sell things. This really is a platonic Structuralist’s dream–finding out that similar things universally follow the same ‘seed’ of development, and again point to the fact that there’s a lot out there to learn, existing somewhere but not yet discovered.

Economics is still young, but its span of existence has been jam packed with innovation. Economics has witnessed the moon landing, the advent of computers, even the spreading of secularism, all things slowly pointing towards science as a holistic way to process wonder and reality. If we do start to consider the idea of a platonic playground we have yet to discover, we could start looking in more of the right directions–underlying structures, complex things that function simplistically, and overall not being afraid to theorize for theory’s sake. Hopefully with time the platonic world of discovery, and invention, will continue to become unveiled for all of us.

Works Cited

Frenkel, Edward. Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality. 2013.

"Is math discovered or invented? - Jeff Dekofsky." Youtube, 27 Oct. 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_xR5Kes4Rs&ab_channel=TED-Ed. Accessed 21 June 2023.