Economic Cubism, Economic Surrealism, and Scale Relativity

Abstract

In the previous chapter, I outlined the main thesis in this monograph, namely, that the Fourth Industrial Revolution is bringing about a new axial shift that will resurrect the legal personality of cities as sovereign polities. This in turn will see cities become the dominant body politic in the twenty-first century. The motivation for this thesis comes from a problematization of scale. This chapter unpacks this problem of scale through a discussion of the principle of scale invariance and its application to economics. The chapter uses cubism and surrealism to explain this principle and its origins.

All is relative; all is changing. That was the message that the world appeared to give to those who were alive around the turn of the [20th] century. The message accounts for the epistemological sensitivity in the modernist works of Proust, Joyce, Dada, the Surrealists, Knight, and Keynes. For if the world is changing, the question is how we can know it and represent it on paper or canvas. And that is an epistemological question … If this is true … we have a problem with the Cartesian connection of twentieth-century scholarship and art. How, for example, to account for the self-assuredness with which economists were wont to discuss a changing economy in terms of simple diagrams, axioms, and mathematical equations? … For clues I briefly refer to the story of modern(ist) art, not because art has necessarily influenced economists—for all I know, it has not—but because art displays visible signs of modernist values and beliefs.

—Arjo Klamer (‘Modernism in Economics: An Interpretation Beyond Physics’ (1993) 25 (suppl 1) History of Political Economy 223, 237)