Altered states: Cartesian and Ricardian dreams

Economics and science are both experiencing crises. These crises have more in common than it might seem, apart from the banal - albeit contested fact - that economics itself is a science. Among the various readings of the crisis of science, behind a dystopian system of incentives and bad practices leading to the so-called reproducibility crisis, one can see the unravelling of the Cartesian dream of power, prediction, and control of man over nature made possible by natural philosophy. Economics has its share of irreproducible results, and economists suffer under the same publish-or-perish culture as other scientists. Yet, in the reading of the specific features of the crisis in economics, the element of ideology is more prevalent: economics would no longer get it right, as its lenses would be those of a neoliberal ideology and of an associated simplified vision of what economics is about. The role of markets in this vision is of paramount importance, so it would not be inappropriate to call this the crisis of the Ricardian dream. In this paper, we investigate what the Cartesian and the Ricardian dreams have in common and discuss what this would imply for our understanding of present-day science and economics.