It’s alive… it’s alive!!!!

The Phillips Machine has risen from the dead, or so says Guardian economics editor, Larry Elliott. Calling it a “computer model of the economy” in the lead, Elliott gets the ownership part of the story right, he notes that the machine was a joint venture of Phillips and Newlyn. He then mises the target by a fist asking Professor Brian Henry a “visiting fellow at the National Institute for Economic and Social Research” for historical insight. Henry explains: “It was a child of its time. It looked at how the economy could be stabilised when people were worried about the stabilisation of aggregate demand. That is the way things were in the 1950s.” Oh those crazy 50s, where people “stabilized.” As far as I know, Phillips and Newlyn were not particularly concerned with the business cycle, although I am sure Professor Henry is.

The article misses the target by an arm and a leg when it comes to revealing economists as hopeless model builders. First, make Phillips, the machine builder, into the man from Mars. In the first paragrah he is: “an engineer turned economist from New Zealand” in the second to last, he “after struggling to get a pass in his original subject, sociology, Phillips eventually became a professor of economics at the LSE.” Second, bring a man from Neptune, to make the machine work.

It took a lecturer from the department of engineering, Allan McRobie, to get it up and running again; no economist could work out quite how Phillips had pieced the original machine together.

The only difference with the original is that McRobie has dispensed with the cochineal because it would stain the Perspex. “Everything was in the wrong place. It had been here since the 1950s but everything was connected wrong. I had to work out what he was trying to do. Economics is run by people who didn’t understand it.

He only changed the cochineal, yet all was in the wrong place? I worry that McRobie faced with the artefact decided to redesign it to “work”, instead of doing careful archaeological reconstruction. If that is the case a precious heritage of economics’ history may have been lost.

Avis, Genella and Eve

In Spring 1937 - I guess it is 1937, but it could be 1931, depending on how you interpret the handwriting -, Avis Windham, Genella Burke and Eve Smith bought a textbook of economic theory. It was Principles of Economics, written by Frederic Garver and Alvin Hansen and first published in 1928 by Ginn and Company. This textbook was among those recommended by Harvard teachers in the 1930s, and it has been read and studied by the likes of Robert Solow and Paul Samuelson, who, in their reminiscences, have described the book as a rather serious, but also dreary and poorly entertaining account of economic theory. It really looks rudimentary - not in content but in form - compared to its modern counterpart, which is full of tables, diagrams and figures.

In the 1930s, economics was a man’s field - some might say it still is. Yet I try to imagine those three women living in the same apartment, sharing this seemingly boring book, underlining some sentences - not many, actually -, writing their names all over it: on the edge, on the top, they wrote their three first names Avis, Genella and Eve, as well as their initials, gracefully forming the acronym AGE. I wonder why they bought this book : was it a course requirement, was it for general knowledge? Were they studying in an American university? Did they obtain a B.Sc. or an equivalent diploma? Where did they end up? Were they the typically liberated young women of the 1930s, with short hair and short skirts, or were they compliant daughters from a rather rich family? They bought just one book for all three: was it too expensive, or just uninteresting for them? 

I guess that knowing a little more about Avis, Genella and Eve, their lives, expectations and intents would bring us more knowledge about the status of economic theory in the 1930s than another article on Piero Sraffa. 

We can sell memory

On Place de la Sorbonne, amidst the flood of tourists and vacationers, a set of panels bloc the view to the majestic building tucked inside the square. They are photos from the uprising that rooted out the pave stones of the Quartier Latin. The photos are humorous and respectful. The photos are titled and footnoted. First footnote, you can take the photos home in a book, which is literally in all bookshops. Second footnote, the celebration of anarchy is sponsored by HSBC, Epson and FNAC, among others.

I don’t want to put the past in a formaldehyde jar, locked in a cabinet. There is nothing in May 68 that I particularly care to preserve. I am merely fascinated by the irony, of how intentions of the past can matter so little for the uses of the present.

X-Men teaches

I don’t usually read the Journal of Business Ethics, one sometimes doubts there is enough of it to fill a journal. Yet, when a paper is titled “X-Men Ethics: Using Comic Books to Teach Business Ethics” (2008, n. 77), who can say no? The authors are R. Spencer Foster, a PhD student in Sociology, and Virginia W. Gerde, an assistant professor in Business, that introduces herself with: “When she served in Iraq as a U.S. Army officer, comic books helped her to break the ice and build relationships.”

Most of the paper is boring, going about establishing some cultural pedigree for comic books, listing how they have been subject to much serious study and that they are a billion dollar industry. The meat of the paper is in the topics or talking points that the authors outline for a course taught in comics narratives. The list includes: “business ethics”, “leadership”, “diversity and teamwork”, “marketing”, “business and government”, “internationalization”, “technology”, “postmodernism and business”, “employee issues”, “gender equity”, “management”, “consumer and product issues”, and so on, until you conclude with “Japanese ethics.”

Here is a quote which will surely become a classic:

Within the mutant population in X-Men, every individual has a unique mutation or ability. The mutants begin to self-identify as part of the group that wants to take over the world (those with Magneto), those who want to live peacefully with the rest of humankind (those with Xavier), and those who have not permanently chosen a side yet have to make short-term choices on who to support, like Wolverine or Rogue in the X-Men series. Within Magneto’s and Xavier’s groups, the mutants work together, acknowledging their differences while working as a team. The two groups even work together to stop a plot aimed at destroying all mutants, demonstrating a temporary coalition of stakeholders that otherwise would not work together.

Surely there must be something in comics for an historian of economics… Maybe some examples of incommensurability that won’t twist your tongue? Maybe one could say that pre-war economics was like a parallel universe?

SOME history please

In the last issue of the Journal of the History of Economic Thought in a symposium on the Future of HET, Ivan Moscati writes that

By using Google, I then found that thirty-eight of [Young] scholars are now working as lecturers, assistant professors or associate professors. More exactly, sixteen entered academia in Europe (five in France; four in Italy; two in the UK; one each in Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal [my emphasis], and Spain); fourteen got into academia in the United States, and eight in other countries …

There is also a table…

Few might quote my papers but my existence is noted. In fact, I am entitled to a row in the “table of youth.” I there discover that I am in “Economics,” which is formally true but speaks nothing of what I am doing or where I will end up. Moscati’s sociology of affiliation serves the argument that in the strained duality economics vs history/science studies, economics wins by a head count.

None of the papers at the symposium read the question historiographically. (Palma gets close, but he is so excited by the marketing pitch that he misses the forest for the trees.) The future of the history of economics is surely the future of writing history. Why then did no one ask, with the courage and curiosity of youth, what questions remain unexamined in economics’ past? I would offer at least two: the communication of economic ideas and economics as cognitive science.

Among the youth, we seem to have plenty of philosopher kings and vice-presidents for marketing, but do we have serious historians?

History and evolution

If it wasn’t for evolution, history wouldn’t exist. Because things are different now than they were then, historians’ excavations make sense. Histories of evolving links between evolution-inspired economics and biology thus greatly risk falling prey to post-modernist quibble. But Clement Levallois’ recent PhD thesis on the history of postwar links between economics and biology in the United States steers clear of all such cheap metaphysics and instead provides a detailed historical account of who, what, where, and why. I think this is a great piece of work. The only thing I could not figure out was why Levallois in the first chapter puts such emphasis on a “new” diachronic historiography, as contrasted with anachronistic historical understanding. The following six chapters do not seem to depend on this (originally Kragh’s) distinction and Levallois only runs the risk of being attacked for a dichotomy he doesn’t really need to explicate. In fact, in a footnote on page 26 Levallois immediately problematizes the dichotomy he just introduced. Then again, perhaps it’s just me. Historiography tends to confuse me.

Wanted: historical punchline

Last week I attempted to enlighten some thirty potential future students into the arguments of economics in a promotion tour of the university that pays my bills. My department’s catch phrase is “more than economics,” which I translated into a “you have to know the history of economics to understand present economics.” A student then raised his hand and asked “how so?” Such a valid question. Why am I so deeply convinced that history of economics is important? I can’t explain.

The soulful present of the dismal science

I have just finished the Soulful Science (subtitled “What economists really do and why it matters”) by Diane Coyle. I recommend it strongly to you. It is both useful and well written. The book aims at presenting a survey of the hottest research topics in today’s economics for a general audience, each chapter being more or less devoted to one theme. It is always easy to criticize such or such choice made by the author and every reader will certainly find something either missing entirely or discussed too rapidly, so I will not go into this. Besides, I tend to agree with the selection made. One of the thing that needs to be underlined is that there is no chapter devoted to macroeconomics (although there is one on the new economics of growth). This choice is interesting because it means that the most interesting developments in recent economics concern micro rather than macroeconomics (I tend to agree with this). Another point that should be emphasized is that there is a whole chapter and parts of at least two others devoted to economic history. My two favourite chapters are the 4th and the 5th, “What is all about” and “Economics of humans”, which discuss the economics of happiness and behavioural economics, respectively. Diane Coyle succeeds in being informative, but not technical, complete, but not boring and her writing aptly conveys well the sense of intense creativity that you get from reading this literature.

The general tone of the book is optimistic on the future of economics and slightly defensive at the same time, rehearsing a bit too often how economics has reshaped itself as a soulful and useful social science. I have no doubts that economics had endured a profound change during the last twenty years and that, in a large part, as a results microeconomics is much more nuanced, both in its methodology and in its results, than it used to be in the heyday of the rational choice revolution in the 80s and 90s. However, this not true to the whole of economics. As Diane Coyle half-heartily admits in the concluding chapter, the recent evolution in economics have been also and for a large part driven by a computer revolution and the subsequent development of econometrics and not necessarily for the best: “The availability of cheap computer power and easy-to-use software does still [LC: I would say "strongly", instead] encourage sloppy applied work”. In my point of view, it is particularly evident in economic history where there is a huge difference between the numerous cliometric papers using bad sets of data without discussing them and the very small number of papers trying to better these sets of data. As a consequence, I am less convinced than Diane Coyle is that modern economic history is both more empirical and more reliable in its conclusions than it used to be. In particular, I found the whole literature based on the construction of cultural indices to measure the impact of culture on development reviewed in the book really problematic: what does these indices really signals besides the naïveté of their authors is an open question.

@ HOPE 2008 - Solow on Solow

They say the record speaks. Here it speaks literally, since Bob Solow, the subject of this meeting, is more alive, mentally quicker, sharper in wit, and more determined than most of the attendees. It is a bit awkward to interpret the man when he is looking from across the table. Solow does not know it, but he exposes how much of our writing, and historical standpoint, is the reconstruction of motives and reenactments. More than one paper has talked about crime stories, finding who did the model and why, stolen work, predecessors, and the like, and the master criminal is there to defend himself.

@ HOPE 2008 - before Solow

It is morning here. Most of the papers at the HOPE 2008 conference on “Robert Solow and Growth theory” have been on predecessors. The point I take from most of the papers is that business cycle study (Swedish and British) led to first stabs at growth theory.

Sporting economics

These days I try to read all the economic commentary I can find. High on my ranking of economic journalists is James Surowiecki of the New Yorker. He writes in his latest “Financial Page” column about the regulation proposals being thrown around the US Treasury Department. The selling pitch of the new regulation package is a move from a “rule-based” approach towards a “principle-based” approach. Surowiecki brings it all down to the turf with a sports analogy…

It’s something like the difference between football and soccer. Football, like most American sports, is heavily rule-bound. There’s an elaborate rulebook that sharply limits what players can and can’t do (down to where they have to stand on the field), and its dictates are followed with great care. Soccer is a more principles-based game. There are fewer rules, and the referee is given far more authority than officials in most American sports to interpret them and to shape game play and outcomes. For instance, a soccer referee keeps the game time, and at game’s end has the discretion to add as many or as few minutes of extra time as he deems necessary. There’s also less obsession with precision—players making a free kick or throw-in don’t have to pinpoint exactly where it should be taken from. As long as it’s in the general vicinity of the right spot, it’s O.K.

And Wall Street is apparently pro-soccer, which I gather is also very un-American.

Regardless of the subtext, what raises my thick eyebrows is the sports metaphor. If in trouble you can always illuminate love, war and economics with a story about youthful play. Life immitates sport.

Wit

Robert Solow was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1987. Late October, Solow found in his post a box from Reebok, inside a pair of tennis shoes and a note saying:

My colleagues and I here at Reebok are very proud to have a recipient of this highest of accolades here with us in Boston.

Solow, famous for his quick wit, replied:

Thanks for the walking shoes. I have already tried them and they’re a complete pleasure - easy, light and comfortable. I don’t know why my feet deserve this reward for something that presumably happened at the opposite end of me, but both ends are grateful.

(Both letters are in Robert Solow Papers, Rare Book, Manuscripts and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Box 19.)

Longing for a romantic turn

When scientists explore new areas language is vivid, sparkling, different. Take Laboratory Life. It lures historians and philosophers of science into a new direction, but above all joyfully plays with ‘order’ and ‘disorder’, with ‘scientist’ and ‘observer.’ As much as it is science it is art: history of science can be a novel of life. But then fields grow older, the analytics get in and all prose and poetry is rigorously slashed until nothing but a formal skeleton remains. The recently published Handbook of Science and Technology Studies is such a book. Science studies has matured. Where enchanted children drew sketchy impression of that magnificent world now grumpy old publish-or-perishers formalize and classify a depressing world in endless reiteration. I protest.

 

It is time for a romantic turn in history and philosophy of science. Science is tantalizing, impossibly incomprehensible and beautiful. Let us no longer formalize what cannot be formalized or dissect what should be regarded in its entirety. Let us seek to express science and scientists. Let us not understand, but experience.

 

Disseminate

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “dissemination” as:

“The action of scattering or spreading abroad seed, or anything likened to it; the fact or condition of being thus diffused; dispersion, diffusion, promulgation.”

A conference jointly run by the European and Japanese societies for the History of Economic Thought, borrows the term for the “Dissemination of Economic Ideas”:

The conference aims at
- investigating how economic ideas developed and spread across national borders (within Europe, Asia, and the US);
- studying the implications of the novel ideas with respect to the ways in which certain economic and social problems were perceived;
- investigating the policies that were derived from the new perspectives assumed and tools adopted;
- studying the impact of the new ideas on the formation of institutions;
- elaborating these aspects in particular with regard to the age of enlightenment, historicism and the interwar period.

The farming metaphor suggests even some: “cross-breeding taking place right now” between Japanese and Western economics.

I don’t want to claim that a call for papers should be a model of precision. Still, I will take these statements to uncharitably interrogate this model of communication of ideas.

Who does what in a dissemination? If there is a planting of the idea-seed, who is the farmer and what is his gain in the harvest? If there is no farmer, then there must be a wind carrying the idea-seed over Persia, the mountains, the deserts, the plains of Asia, and across the sea to Japan. The aerial seed-idea makes root nowhere else but Japan. So what about soil characteristics?

“Dissemination” raises many questions but I am not sure they are the right ones. Surely, the questions should be taking us to consider the agency of these processes, the interests of the involved, their interactions, political, and cultural conflicts. Instead, we are directed toward the seed-idea, as if of itself it could tell us something.

Note keeping

Yesterday, I saw a talk by Hans-Jorg Rheinberger, Director of the MPIWG. The title was “The Economy of the Scribble.” It is worth the footnote that “economy” in its Aristotelian sense, is gaining currency among cultural studies people. On my shelf is Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell’s Tissue Economies, by all opinions a really important book. There was no blood in Rheinberger’s talk, it was mostly about paper. With a really nice example from botany, Rheinberger pressed the idea that notes: the material practices of producing and distributing them, are critical to understand knowledge making. His metaphors were still unstable. At times notes were “containers,” at other times “reversible inscriptions,” and there were such things as “constellations.” He added that we can (encore une fois) reconsider scientific research communities in terms of the note taking and sharing.

It is all very sexy, as sexy as history can be. I caught myself lamenting that what I do is so very different from this both grand and detailed scrutiny of the scientist in action. It is odd to confess that I would like to dig into a study of a scientific drawing, a table, a graph, and the scribbled and stained notes that adjusted its creation. Why is it so romantic?