In 1849, the Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle labeled economics the “dismal science.” Two centuries later, contemporary practitioners still study dismal choices: Higher prices or fewer jobs? Spend or save? They have also become a smug lot.
Economists take pride in the sophisticated statistical techniques on which they rely to analyze phenomena such as growth, inflation, unemployment, trade, and even the long-term effects of abortion on crime rates. Many are convinced that their methods are more rigorous than those of all other social sciences and dismiss research that does not rest on quantitative methods as little more than “storytelling” or, worse, “glorified journalism.” Anthropologists, some economists jest, believe that the plural of anecdote is “data.”
A survey published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives found that 77 percent of the doctoral candidates in the leading departments in the United States believe that “economics is the most scientific of the social sciences.” It turns out, however, that this certitude does not stem from how well they regard their own discipline but rather from their contempt for the other social sciences. Although they were nearly unanimous about the relative superiority of their profession, only 9 percent of the respondents were convinced that economists agree on fundamental issues.
And they are right. Economists today are still grappling with basic questions for which they have no answers. Much more than fodder for academic squabbles, this uncertainty often has serious consequences. When economists err in theory, people suffer in practice. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Brazil’s former president, recalls that in the midst of his country’s financial crisis, he received calls from experts at the International Monetary Fund, several Nobel laureates in economics, and other superstars in the economics firmament. Each offered different advice, and each sounded convinced that his or her recommendation was the only correct one. A distinguished sociologist, Cardoso managed to employ his considerable talents and experience to steer Brazil out of the crisis, ignoring the recommendations of several celebrity economists—some of whom had even urged him to adopt a fixed exchange-rate regime just like the one that Argentina’s recent crash has now discredited.
“We do not really know what causes economic growth,” admits François Bourguignon, the chief economist at the World Bank. “We do have a good sense of what are the main obstacles to growth and what are the conditions without which an economy can’t grow. But we are far less sure about what are the other ingredients needed to create and sustain growth.”....
...A science that relies on luck to explain the fate of billions of people is a dismal science indeed. True, other social sciences aren’t in much better shape, but economists would still be well advised to trade in their intellectual haughtiness for a more humble disposition. Albert O. Hirschman, a superbly original economist, borrowed freely from other disciplines and aptly titled one of his books Essays in Trespassing. We need more trespassers. Fortunately, a few of today’s economists are beginning to hurdle professional fences and mine neurology, psychology, sociology, and political science to enrich their analysis.
To be sure, most of these attempts at boundary crossing won’t yield much of value, and they render economists vulnerable to charges of consorting with the methodologically impure. But given the dismal condition of the dismal science, intellectual trespassing is a risk worth taking.
Monday, March 06, 2006
The dismal science
Feeling anti-economics, as I often do. This applies not to economics as a discipline of inquiry - I'm a fan of thinkers such as Smith, Hirschman, Sen. It applies to the culture of economics as a contemporary field that has infiltrated fields other than itself and told those fields what to do. It must be nice being an economist - you even get to say what's valuable in academia and outside of it and then pay yourself accordingly. I deal with economic messes on a near-daily basis as a non-economist with a basic knowledge of economics who finds all sorts of tragically necessary cleanup work in public policy and international affairs. I'm all for "trespassing" in any direction that helps us truly explain and resolve problems. It gets really old being a "nettoyeur." Moisés Naím at Foreign Policy appears to agree.
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3 comments:
Ah, the dilemma of the economist. He so wants to be seen as a hard scientist. Alas, when he explains what has happened, he (ideally) tells us the who, what, where, when and why. That's either history or journalism, depending on the warmth of the bones he is picking.
When he tells us what will happen, he predicts the behavior of large numbers of people as they interact with what we refer to as "the economy." That's simply social science, with the exception that the economist doesn't usually get to set the parameters of his "experiment."
Will the subject contine to increase the voltage in obedience to authority? Milgram (1)wanted to know, (2)devised an experiment, and (3)found out. The economist doesn't get to, say, peg oil prices to the Euro in order to learn the effects of such a change. So he is left with describing what experiment he would conduct if he could, and what the result would be if he did. Since there is no actual experiment, there is no actual science, leaving our economist in the no-man's land between psychology and soothsaying.
(Of course, there has been some actual experimental stuff done on the micro- level, but last time I checked, we aren't letting doctoral candidates tinker with the global economy for the sake of their dissertations.)
I have always thought game theory to be the most "scientific" area of economics, as witness John Nash's Beautiful Mind and his Beautiful Nobel Prize in Economics. But its applications in other areas, such as personal relationships, philosophy, law, etc., prevent it from being the "turf" of any particular discipline.
Is the reluctance to "trespass" an artifact of academia? I'd be interested in your thoughts on this, as an academic.
(Thanks for the blogroll link, btw.)
It strikes me that trespassing isn't the best word for it, in general (though it appears to work fine for Hirschman). I mean, so much of the antagonism expressed by economists for other disciplines seems--to borrow from another discipline--like so much projection. As an academic myself, I can assure you that it hasn't anything to do with turf; I suspect it has much, much more to do with pride. So it doesn't seem like trespassing so much as it seems like eating crow.
That makes for a great book title, though, doesn't it? Crow: It's What's for Dinner.
Roxtar - thanks to you too for the blogroll link. Blogroll buddies at last!
My colleague, Thomas Schelling, also won the Nobel just this past year for his applied work in game theory. He's a terrific man with a terrific mind. But I'm skeptical even of game theory. I see it applied to, say, international environmental agreements, and then see results that are the product of various interests involved in gaming, as opposed to a product that actually resolves the problem the agreement is supposed to tackle. The Kyoto Protocol is such a result - a 5% global reduction in carbon emissions doesn't do much in terms of tackling global warming, but it's an agreement! What many say is the positive result is that it sets up new norms as bases for further negotiations. Obviously, different parties have different interests and in the international sphere any kind of agreement will likely be a watered-down product of negotiations. But it's premised on the same old assumptions about interest, incentive, the danger of free-riding in compliance, etc. Re Kyoto, perhaps the real lesson is that more work ought to be focused on the normative?
"Trespassing" is probably a misnomer. Academics have been talking for a long time about the importance of "interdisciplinary" work. And there's some good stuff out there. But economics trespassing into other disciplines isn't a good in itself since orthodox economics comes packaged with all sorts of assumptions that others - philosophers, for example - find really problematic. When economists say they're doing normative work, philosophers go nuts. The trespassing really has to go two (or many) ways or its simply disciplinary imperialism. I don't know if this is only a reactionary question of pride. If you look at the World Bank, for example, a minority of people who work there are economists (the percentage is in the 30s, I was once told). Everyone else is called, by the economists, "anthropologists." It doesn't matter what your background is, you're an anthropologist if you're not an economist. That in itself, to me, seems like very unscientific blindness (as in the method of science). That the language of the policy world is dominated by economic language and categorization is not a reason for saying that economics has all the answers to policy issues.
My own view is that social, political, environmental, etc. problems are of a sufficiently complex nature, and we have so much evidence that disciplinary narrowness has yielded only mixed results on these issues, that the trespassing needs to go in all sorts of directions. Maybe its all an academic artifact. But, prior to Newton, philosophy and science weren't viewed as entirely distinct species. Specialization played the big role here, perhaps tied to industrialization of economies. I'm all for being technically specialized, doing "pure" whatever. But if you want to do policy/political/normative work, then you can't reduce your methods and categories to one discipline, the latter which is shaped anyway by particular kinds of concerns and histories.
Like the fecund ecotone, when looking at overlapping ecosystems, I think a lot of good, creative, and interesting work gets done at the boundaries of disciplines. But that this work has a difficult time gaining any purchase on broader discourses may be precisely an artifact of academic disciplinarity, as well as some disciplines' influence on broader assumptions in the broader public.
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