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Galilean Economics

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From Galileo to Modern Economics

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Abstract

Giving priority to scientific rigor, Galileo obliged the proto-economists to adopt his criteria (observation, experimentation, and mathematization), prompting a turning point in the strengthening tendency to trust in numbers. The methodological rigor guaranteed by mathematics was gradually becoming established as requisite for any scientific enterprise. In the merchants’ world, numbers were simply a way to trade with more certainty, while in Galileo’s scientific world, applied (not pure) mathematics was needed to understand and manage any economic relationship. Galileo pushed mathematics toward instrumental uses, strengthening interest in the use of mathematics in the hard sciences, but also drawing the attention of social thinkers, beginning with the monetarist ones.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Cited in McCauley 2009, p. 5.

  2. 2.

    On Medieval economic thought, see Evangelisti 2017.

  3. 3.

    Here is the original scholium: Non me latet, hane reciprocam mutuamque dependentiam esse veluti inertissimam trutinam, utpote quae ab opinione pendeat, quae nequit rem exacte aestimare: verum augmentum hoc, ut geometrice tractetur, necesse est rem, non pro ut fit accipere, sed quemadmodum oporteret. See Masè-Dari 1935, p. 39.

  4. 4.

    Boven (1912, p. 41) wrote that Ceva’s work is scientific and practical at one and the same time (Ce traité est à la fois scientifique et pratique).

  5. 5.

    The term jurisconsult—from the Latin jūris consultus—identified the person authorized to give legal advice.

  6. 6.

    The vocabulary represented in a scatterplot that “can be regarded as a map, because the position of each [economist] can be regarded as a two-dimensional position, almost like a geographical location in a region defined by latitude and longitude. We say that the scatterplot […] simply expresses the [words/segments] in a visual format that communicates […] information” (Greenacre 2007, p. 5). Correspondence analysis provides “ways for describing data, interpreting data and generating hypotheses” without a theoretical model or preconceived hypothesis. How can the scatterplots contained in the book be read? A word/segment close to an active variable—economist, year—means that the word/segment in question connotes texts/speeches concerning said active variable. In the center (centroid) of the figure, we naturally find the words/segments that are common to the active variables we are considering, without characterizing one or few in particular. We find the “inertia” or “variance” of the figure on the two axes: the higher the inertia, the greater the variability of the lexicon concerning the active variables in question; and the lower the inertia, the more homogeneous the lexicon. The analysis of the textual corpora demanded the use of specific software. We used Taltac to manage the corpus and Spad to extract the figures. The final graphical visualization represents the initial corpus in terms of statistical associability between elements. The software thus serves as an advanced text analysis tool for deriving high-quality information from complex corpora. Since we are studying six authors in this case, we obtain five uncorrelated axes that display the words investigated for each author considered, and the axes can be combined to form different planes. Each plane represents a part of the variability, and shows a single synthetic outcome based on the part of variability it represents. The inertia (roughly speaking, the variability of the words over the set of authors) that can be read on the horizontal and vertical axes indicates how the variability is distributed over the various authors. A high inertia means that each author adopts and plots a different rhetorical style.

  7. 7.

    Unless we consider an ethics based on mathematics. See R.M. Corona 2013.

  8. 8.

    Ludovico Muratori’s influence is unquestionable. See Chap. XII, Delle Matematiche in L. Muratori. 1749. Della Pubblica Felicità. Lucca.

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  1. University of Padova, Padova, Italy

    Gianfranco Tusset

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Tusset, G. (2018). Galilean Economics. In: From Galileo to Modern Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95612-1_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95612-1_2

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