Exploring economics and society
In Economics and Society: A Collection of Essays, Ben Ettridge sets himself an ambitious task: to question not just the prevailing models of economic thought but the assumptions that underpin the very idea of economics as a science. In two lucid and quietly provocative essays, Ettridge interrogates what it means to understand a social world through systems that seek, perhaps vainly, to predict it.
The first essay addresses the longstanding tension between predictionist and causalist approaches to social science. Ettridge is sceptical of the belief that human behaviour—volatile, relational, historically contingent—can be treated like molecular motion in a physics lab. Economists have long borrowed the tools of natural science in the hope of replicating its precision. Jevons, inspired by Newton, sought to derive economic law from assumptions about the rational economic agent. Ettridge does not dismiss such attempts outright. He acknowledges the real progress that modelling and statistics have made in certain domains. But he raises an important philosophical objection: that such models, no matter how sophisticated, are only ever approximations, grounded in artificial regularities that rarely survive contact with the open system of real social life.
Ettridge’s argument is not an outright rejection of quantitative methods. Rather, he suggests that the true promise of social science may lie in the combination of rigorous causal analysis and carefully constructed prediction—an uneasy marriage, perhaps, but one that reflects the complexity of the field. The analogy he draws is persuasive: just as engineers continue to use simplifications of kinetic theory despite its known limitations, economists may continue to model behaviour, provided they remain conscious of the epistemological risks involved.
The second essay applies similar scrutiny to the nature of the firm. Drawing on Tony Lawson’s theory of social positioning, Ettridge casts the modern corporation not merely as an economic actor but as a socially embedded institution. Firms are constituted by roles, rights, and obligations, and these, he argues, form a kind of community. The legal identity of the corporation—its capacity to own property, to sue, to issue shares—sits uneasily alongside its moral and social responsibilities. It is in this space that Ettridge locates a power vacuum, a tension between ownership and control that renders many large firms effectively unaccountable. Directors pursue shareholder interests, often narrowly defined, while disclaiming moral responsibility for the broader effects of their actions.
The critique is not new, but Ettridge's treatment is notably restrained. He resists the polemical register in favour of measured analysis, contrasting Lawson’s communitarian theory with the harder economic realism of Milton Friedman, who argued that social responsibility was a distraction from the firm’s core function. Ettridge allows both views to unfold without caricature, though it is clear where his sympathies lie. He sees in Lawson’s approach not only a more ethically grounded account of corporate life but also a way to reintegrate economics into its social context.
There is an admirable clarity to Ettridge’s prose. Though the subject matter ranges across economic theory, philosophy of science, and legal fiction, the tone remains accessible without being reductive. That the essays originate from outside the academy—the author is a schoolteacher, not a professor—gives them a certain freshness. They are not beholden to disciplinary orthodoxy, nor burdened by academic jargon. The result is a short volume that offers more insight per page than many weightier tomes.
Ettridge’s book is an invitation to think carefully about how we construct knowledge in the social sciences, and to consider the assumptions we too often accept as neutral. It is, in this sense, not just a contribution to economics but a defence of a broader intellectual humility—one that is all the more urgent in a world enamoured with models and metrics, but still governed by people.