ABSTRACT

This chapter will suggest how a natural scientist can understand the use which economics makes of the word ‘equilibrium’. I will argue that a simple concept, unexceptionable for the study of many physical phenomena, has been transformed into something completely different. If, therefore, we naively expect to find it applied in economics in the same way as ‘energy’ in physics or ‘molecule’ in chemistry, as a means of describing and explaining what an impartial observer may independently verify, we will misunderstand its real significance.