Throughout the history of economics, a variety of analytical tools have
been borrowed from the so-called exact sciences. As Schoe?er (1955) puts
it: "They have taken their mathematics and their ded- tive techniques
from physics, their statistics from genetics and agr- omy, their systems
of classi?cation from taxonomy and chemistry, their model-construction
techniques from astronomy and mechanics, and their methods of analysis
of the consequences of actions from en- neering". The possibility of
similarities of structure in mathematical models of economic and
physical systems has been an important f- tor in the development of
neoclassical theory. To treat the state of an economy as an equilibrium,
analogous to the equilibrium of a mech- ical system has been a key
concept in economics ever since it became a mathematically formalized
science. Adopting a Newtonian paradigm neoclassical economics often is
based on three fundamental concepts. Firstly, the representative agent
who is a scale model of the whole society with extraordinary capacities,
particularly concerning her - pability of information processing and
computation. Of course, this is a problematic reduction as agents are
both heterogeneous and bou- edly rational and limited in their cognitive
capabilities. Secondly, it often con?ned itself to study systems in a
state of equilibrium. But this concept is not adequate to describe and
to support phenomena in perpetual motion.
