Challenging Mental Models: The Power of Pre-Analytic Vision in Economics
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…The ideas handed down to us can be very hard to shake off, but Joseph Schumpeter, was determined to do so, to make way for his own insights. As Schumpeter wrote in his 1954 History of Economic Analysis, ‘In practice we all start our own research from the work of our predecessors, that is, we hardly ever start from scratch. But suppose we did start from scratch, what are the steps we should have to take? Obviously, in order to be able to posit to ourselves any problems at all, we should first have to visualize a distinct set of coherent phenomena as a worthwhile object of our analytic effort. In other words, analytic effort is of necessity preceded by a pre-analytic cognitive act that supplies the raw material for the analytic effort.’ …
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…Schumpeter’s concept of pre-analytic vision was inspired by the ideas of sociologist Karl Mannheim whose observation in the late 1920s that, ‘every point of view is particular to a social situation’ led him to popularise the notion that we each have a ‘worldview’ which acts as the lens through which we interpret the world. In the 1960s, Thomas Kuhn turned scientific research upside down by pointing out that ‘scientists work from models acquired through education often without quite knowing or needing to know what characteristics have given these models the status of community paradigms.’ In the 1970s, sociologist Erving Goffmann introduced the concept of ‘framing’ – in the sense that each of us views the world through a mental picture frame – to show that the way we make sense out of our jumble of experience delineates what we can then see.
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Pre-analytic vision. Worldview. Paradigm. Frame. These are cousin concepts. What matters more than the one you choose to use is to realise that you have one in the first place, because then you have the power to question and change it. In economics, that’s an open invitation to look afresh at the mental models we employ in describing and understanding the economy. But it is no easy thing to do… The difficulty lies not in the new ideas, but in the old ones which ramify, for those of us brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.’The possibility of shaking off old mental models is enticing, but the quest for new ones comes with caveats. First, always remember that ‘the map is not the territory’, as the philosopher Alfred Korzybski put it: every model can only ever be a model, a necessary simplification of the world, and one that should never be mistaken for the real thing. Second, there is no correct pre-analytic vision, true paradigm or perfect frame out there to be discovered. In the deft words of the statistician George Box, ‘All models are wrong, but some are useful.’ Rethinking economics is not about finding the correct one (because it doesn’t exist), it’s about choosing or creating one that best serves our purpose – reflecting the context we face, the values we hold, and the aims we have. As humanity’s context, values, and aims continually evolve, so too should the way that we envision the economy.
