Is there actually any such thing as a science of economics? Sidney Schoeffler, in a remarkably stimulating book called The Failures of Economics (Harvard University Press, $4.75), goes pretty far toward saying that the subject just doesn’t exist in any scientific sense of the word.This does not mean that he considers economists to be superfluous. What it does mean, in his opinion, is that economists must accustom themselves to dealing with the consequences of data presented by antecedent phenomena. Ludwig von Mises, in a moment of brilliant insight, once remarked that economics is part of a wider study of human choice in general. Professor Schoeffler builds voluminously on the Mises perception to show that economics moves backward into everything from sociology and religion to psychology, chemistry, physics, technology, geology, geography, climate, and pure accident. All of these things form or condition the human being’s expenditure of time and energy, with often incalculable economic results. Economic values are conditioned by other values: for example, a nation of ascetics would hardly develop either an economy of abundance, or the techniques and phenomena of mass production and low price.

The upshot of it all is that no economist is justified in thinking in terms of closed systems. Accurate prediction, it follows, is often fairly close to impossible: the variables that move, sometimes virtually at random, into the realm of economics are too multitudinous to be grouped into any dependable patterns of probability. That is why economists, like meteorologists, are often hopelessly wrong in the attempt to provide “information” about the future. It is also a compelling reason for rejecting the politico-economic philosophy of central planning: the impossibility of deriving accurate “information” about next Week or next year renders planning futile at best, and disastrous if the supposed “information” happens to be radically wrong.

Professor Schoeffler’s method of writing is hardly calculated to appeal to the layman. His vocabulary is almost barbarously technical; his “case system” often seems the epitome of fragmentation. But if one makes the effort to rise above the book as an airman rises above the seemingly crude chaos of topography, the “grain” of the argument becomes sufficiently clear. Economists, says Schoeffler, have erred by taking their methods from sciences that have predictive possibilities, such as astronomy or engineering; or they have tried to be economic mathematicians without stopping to reflect that mathematics is a way of stating the same thing in different ways, depending on what side of the equation the statement happens to be placed.

The element of free will does not obtrude into astronomy or bridge building or mathematics: Halley’s comet obeys no aberrant impulses, and the cables of the George Washington Bridge do not suddenly take off in flight. But free will is always affecting the data of human choice. The general cussedness of human beings may not make a mockery of the so-called laws of “statistical probability” in many instances, but, as Professor Schoeffler demonstrates, every so often statistical probability takes a fearful beating even when IBM calculators are sorting out the “facts” and combining them into “information” about the shape of things to come.

Professor Schoeffler lists the things which make economic prediction such a hazardous matter. There is, first of all, the impossibility of controlled experimentation. Secondly, there is the element of free will, which, though not susceptible of “proof,” must at least be accepted as a “not-rejected” hypothesis. Then there is the general “indeterminacy” of the universe, which is especially annoying when one is dealing with unique events in a very complicated structure that is subject to a large cumulation of indeterminacies. Finally, there is the fallibility of the human observer working with a system that does not demonstrably obey conservation laws.

Even if economic forecasting could be completely founded on accurate and unemotional observation, it would defeat itself because the very act of making the prediction alters the course of future events. For example, if a mild depression is predicted by a large enough number of influential forecasters, the scramble to reduce inventories or to save money could lead to a severe depression. On the other hand, the reduction of inventories at cut rates might cause a basically exuberant people to spend their savings at an accelerated rate, thus laying the basis for a boom. Thus the same prediction might have results that could vary at 180 degrees. When the forecasters were predicting depression after World War II, the flow of war savings into consumption knocked the prognosticators galley west. Similarly, a later prediction of depression was canceled out by government orders made necessary by the fighting in Korea.

Professor Schoeffler shows how economists seeking analogies in chemical systems, biophysical systems, or mechanical systems inevitably tend to fall back on such aids to an unreal simplicity as “artificial mechanization,” “artificial generalization,” “artificial systematization,” “artificial fixation,” “artificial factorization,” “artificial closure,” “artificial isolation,” “artificial indirectness,” and the mistaking of the heterogeneous for the homogeneous. Sometimes the use of models based on physical or biological science works out sufficiently well to encourage the economist in his addiction to his “tools of analysis.” But often this occurs, says Schoeffler, because of luck, or because certain errors of judgment tend to cancel each other out, or because unseen and unknown “other things” happen for the moment to be equal. Ordinarily, the field of study of the social scientist does not “exhibit the required structural constancies needed for accurate prediction.”

Does all this mean that the attempt to predict in economic matters must be abandoned? Surprisingly enough, Professor Schoeffler does not commit himself to any such pessimism. What he does is to counsel economists to study the sciences that are antecedent to human choice in the purely economic realm. The study of sociology, he hazards, might conceivably yield something useful regarding the rate of change of economic mores and institutions, or about the compatibility of economic phenomena with a given set of mores. (If Schoeffler were a sociologist, he might have less confidence that accurate prediction about changes in the general mores is any more possible than accurate forecasting in economics. Who, knowing England in 1859, for example, would have predicted the 1945-49 socialism of Clement Attlee?) Or, to continue with the list of useful suggestions about setting economic choice in a wider field, a study of chemistry can disclose much about the possible transformation of resources. And the psychologist might uncover a good deal about human motivations leading up to economic expression of one sort or another.

If all this tends to make economics appear a hopeless hybrid, it is not cause for despair. Professor Schoeffler thinks the “art” of economics, as distinct from the “science” of economics, is very much worth practising. He himself offers some predictive theories based on advanced modern systems of symbolic logic. I lack the technical training in this field to know whether his own complicated models of prediction are any more worthy of respect than the ones he has so brilliantly demolished. But the usefulness of Professor Schoeffler’s book does not rest on its own “positive” contribution to the “art” of prediction. It is enough to have pointed out the reasons for the frailty and fallibility of economists in general. For myself, it is enough to know that the assumption of free will in individual human beings negates the theory of the usefulness or even the possibility of central planning. The “art” of economics, as set forth by Schoeffler, buttresses laissez faire as a doctrine worthy of renewed general respect. For if it is impossible to know precisely where we are going, it is plain common sense to refrain from telling people what they “must” do to get there.