Economics cannot but be reliant upon the imagery it uses, and naturally the whole breadth of human experience is drawn upon for economic knowledge to be communicated, bringing geological, meteorological, plant and animal imagery to bare - as when the landscape shifts, the climate changes, cash flows, green shoots are seen, and animal spirits return.

But how deliberate a process is this? I suspect that for many economists, the words used and the thoughts that lie behind them are neither here nor there, because what really count are the underlying facts. Yet, if, as author Owen Barfield suggests, 'interior is anterior', those very facts are nothing but the product of the imaginative experience. Something of this thought is to be found in George Soros's idea of reflexivity - that the facts are not independent of the way one thinks about them.

When economics meets metaphysics, then its aspiration to represent the scientific method is tested. Can one contemplate a science of the imagination? Certainly the economics of mathematical modelling looks less scientific when the key variable is missing - the conscious, creative, irrational human being. The publication this month of The Romantic Economist by Richard Bronk, may serve to show that some other path is viable than the one along which humanity has been blithely proceeding.

Yet nor should the technical be eshewed, in favour of mere psychologising. From an associative perspective this technical element is better represented by the concreteness of accounting than the abstraction of mathematising. The current issue of Associate! (see below), visits both ends of the spectrum, passing from the etherealisation of money to the actuality of accounting conventions.
Arthur Edwards

1)   Forthcoming Events

• Making Credit Less Crunchy: 12 Feb & 19 Mar / Rudolf Steiner House, London
• The Colours of Money: 20-22 February / Viroqua, USA
• Inner and Outer Aspects of Associative Economics: 27 Feb - 1 Mar / Auckland, New Zealand. 13-15 March / Melbourne, Australia
• The Colours of Money: 3-5 April / Stroud, England