The basic unit of economic analysis: Individuals or markets?: A comment on “Markets come to bits” by Phil. Mirowski

Mirowski has put forward an argument for viewing the economy as a set of interlocking markets. I argue that he is right to shift attention from the individual to a higher level. He further holds that there has been a shift to considering the informational problem as central to economics and that this can provide the framework for a new vision of markets as automata. I see the decline of homo economicus as rather due to a dissatisfaction with the intrinsic value of that concept with the development of cognitive economics and a realisation that this notion can give us no hold on analysing aggregate behaviour. However, markets are indeed, important and they have been largely ignored as a result of our preoccupation with the individual. Different market forms co-exist in reality, and it is necessary to analyse the reasons for this. However, to reduce them to computable algorithms may miss many of the other features which make them fascinating but intractable.