Toronto

Back from Toronto after an orgy of papers and sessions. First HES meeting I attended, it was a very good experience. I will try to make it next year.  Several researchers delivered their expected good papers: Judy Klein presenting the last chapter of her forthcoming book on the war-origins of economic analysis, or Tim Leonard on the nexus of social science / religion / evolutionary thinking in the late 19th century.

For me, the good surprise came from a young researcher: Jose Edwards on the relationship between economics and psychology. Among other things, he hinted that the divide in psychology between introspection and behaviorism had some echo among economists - who tried to devise a third way. I should read more of this stuff, because I am more and more convinced that psychology is a science acting as a go-between with many fields (eg, biology, management science, political science), a bit like statistics in some respect. It suggests that psychology would be a good starting point for whom is interested in drawing an integrated story of (social) science in the twentieth century.

Oh, and I have some pictures! Just follow the link: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=46430&l=c6337&id=522296095

@ 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.

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?

Krugman, slayer of Presidents

Paul Krugman visited us. In the days of yore, liberals gave public lectures when they were campaigning. Today liberals go on speaking tours to promote their books. In the event this sounds too cynical, let me correct and say maybe books are just good excuses to get invited to speak. Either way, there was a book involved: The Conscience of a Liberal. (I have not read or bought the book, but remain hopeful that father Xmas will give it to me.)

The Conscience of … is a much abused title. One finds besides liberals, christians, conservationists, pharmacists, statisticians and even lawyers (twice), all have a conscience. Krugman acknowledges Barry Goldwater’s 1960, The Conscience of a Conservative for his choice. I recently read J.K. Galbraith’s 1972 review of Chester Bowles’s biography and he made the lamenting remark that Bowles had been unduly marginalized by the Democratic Party. Bowles had a set of essays collected into the 1962 volume: The Conscience of a Liberal, of which Krugman made no mention. It seems Galbraith was right.

Krugman spoke to a packed foyer, people crowned the open staircases trying to catch a glimpse of his beard. Krugman’s thesis appears to be that the Republican Party’s electoral success has been due to a cultural divide in America. The white South, has been lost to the Democrats because of the fear of race. Krugman sees this changing as the South becomes less white and the American people more liberal in practical policy issues: health care.

I have no thoughts about this argument. I was at the lecture to see the public intellectual of economics. What made him distinctive? And how effective was he? He did not read a speech. He does not have a clear or pleasant voice and by the end sounded tired. He knew when to drop a joke to keep the audience’s attention. But he is not charismatic and his speaking ranks behind his writing. What is striking is that he argues (and thinks) like a social scientist. Rhetorically, he drops definitive numbers, statistics, dates, always appearing exact. Over and above this “trust in numbers,” he speaks through comparisons: labor market trends in US and Canada, cost of health care in US and France, now and the 1970s tax burdens.

For Krugman to convince is not to describe but to compare. Maybe that is why he mentions Goldwater and not Bowles, he favors the comparison.

A BIG event

Something exciting is happening in London. At the University College of London and at the London School of Economics, a subtle but significant shift in the history and philosophy of science is being proposed. The themes of the past have generally been experiment and proof, the new turn is towards “evidence.” Instead of science made and restive, it’s science forever mobile. Evidence moves in multiple spaces of use, semantics and epistemology. Science is a great traveler, explorer, conquerer and tourist.

On the 13th and 14th of December the British Academy hosts a conference titled: “Enquiry, Evidence and Facts: An Interdisciplinary Conference.” There the insights of the UCL and LSE groups can be sampled. For those at easy reach of London and with deep pockets to pay the pricey attendance fee, it ought not to be missed.