History of Economics Playground

No theorizing today, just a quote from the last paragraph of the preface of the very interesting Let us now praise famous men.

Here it is: “This is a book only by necessity. More seriously, it is an effort in human actuality in which the reader is no less centrally involved than the authors and those of whom they tell.Those who wich actively to participate in the subject, in whatever degree of understanding, friendship, or hostility, are invited to address the authors in care of the publishers. In material that is used, privately or publicly, names will be withheld on request.”

I am wondering whether anyone ever wrote to the authors/the publisher and what did he wrote?

Businessmen are steely figures. They hire and fire. They invest and disinvest. They make decisions in the haze of uncertainty. And for all that they calculate, reason, plan.

Yet, in contrast to this materialistic character, they subscribe to mysticism. Executives are known to pay absurd sums to “management experts” to hear a litany of pedestrian commentary on the great business adventure. For instance, Jim Collins‘ new book, making the cover of Business Week, Why the Mighty Fall: And Some Companies Never Give In. The core of the book is identifying the 5 stages of failure:

1. Hubris born of success
2. Undisciplined pursuit of more
3. Denial of risk and peril
4. Grasping for salvation
5. Capitulation to irrelevance or death

In reading it I had the feeling it was a rip off of the Kubler-Ross model, of the 5 stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) reordered. It is clearly charismatic for some audiences. (He definitely looks good! Like a younger Michael Porter.) It is undoubtedly successful discourse. But what is it? Is it self-help psychology for organizations? Or is it fiction with scientistic claims to spice the imagination?

You don’t find jokes about economic graphs every day. Looking for a catch phrase for a paper on visual representation and economics textbooks, I came across political satirist PJ O’Rourke’s Eat the Rich, subtitled “A Treatise on Economics”. On page 110, O’Rourke introduces an absurd diagram in which he relates “the number of pages of Econ text devoted to graphical analysis” to “the number of Econ students asleep in the lecture hall”.  On page 105, he summarizes the attitude of most undergraduate students toward the principles of economics class: “I. There are a lot of graphs II. I’d better memorize them III. Or get last year’s test”. Okay, that’s funny. And so I have my catch phrase.

What is not as fun, on the other hand, is the rather populist background that comes with that joke when we get deeper into O’Rourke’s book. What he really means, in fact, is that economic diagrams as well as other technical elements are thrown in the introductory course only to introduce socialist ideas, for example the idea that “all wealth is the result of criminal conspiracy among: A. Jews B. Japanese. C. Pirates in neckties on Wall Street” (Ibid.). One of the examples provided by the author is the Keynesian equation Y=[C+I+G+(X-M)]/(1-c). He notes that “it’s hard to imagine applying the above formula to any ordinary economic question, e.g. should I put my bonus in a certificate of deposit or buy new stereo speakers?” (p. 106). O’Rourke may well have his definition of “economics” from Aristotle rather than from Robbins, so it’s easy to disembowel the guy for writing that but most importantly, all of the chapter is to show us that mathematical economics is simply socialist thinking dressed in fashionable mathematical nonsense. I thought this kind of thinking had been thrown out with McCarthyism. So this is not so funny, after all …

What is a bit funnier, on the other hand, is that the opposite discourse has become as fashionable: thanks to Sonja Amadae, we know that mathematical economics and assumptions about rational behavior necessarily imply the defense of capitalism as a political discourse. Amadae is probably more researched than O’Rourke in her demonstration but the similarity between the two theses is that mathematical economists are just idiots who are not even aware of the political implications of their discourse. For O’Rourke, they’re just a bunch of socialists in disguise; for Amadae, they just underwrite the protection of big corporations. I am not naive: I would not assert that there is no politics in methods. I just wonder whether it is too much asking for more subtlety…

Lately, I’ve been dwelling on a recent comment by Robert Leonard on this blog:

“I have found the biggest struggle to be learning to stop, or suspend, thinking as an economist. A training in economics is a necessary point of departure, but it can also quickly become a yoke around one’s neck when it comes to writing history, especially a history that tries to embrace the subtleties of language and human behaviour. For that, I’m inclined to view novels and other fiction as better preparation.”

I have never been able to face the use of the novels and fiction I read without a good share of guilt. Using them to immerse in a time, to understand its beat, its fears and hopes I find acceptable (to myself), but using them to get into people’s mind with hope of better understanding people (and thus economists’ and scientists’) motives, wants, ambitions…..is this really decent? Doesn’t it make up for my lack of empathy, sensibility, observation, openess? Why am I unable to explain why I sense that my interest in science fiction should eventually permeate my historical research?

But do I have any other mean to refine this ability to “embrace the subtleties of human behavior” that makes a good historian? Also, when I’m calling in the psychological description of such character to flesh the sense of collapse and uncertainty and a jewish emigré may have felt in the early thirties or a graduate student may have experienced in Vietnam, for instance, I feel I’m making the implicit –and unwarranted- assumption that there is something permanent in the human nature that transcends times and cultures.

This unmistakably bring me back to my old missmarpling dilemma. Miss Marple is this armchair detective by Agatha Christie who is able to solve various crimes by drawing parallels between the riddles she faces and seemingly unrelated and insignificant incidents she had witnessed in her little village of Saint Mary Mead. Her idea is that “human nature is much the same everywhere” the same and that to gain insight into human motives, observing a small microcosm is sufficient. I wonder how much missmarpling historians can/ should afford? Can we write good history by comparing situations we witness or experience (including our professional tribulations) with those of previous economists, even though their individual history, context and, of course, abilities are different? Are we allowed as historians to fill the holes left by published and unpublished records, to flesh the skeleton and endow it with the voice that reflects the murmurs of our empathy for our subjects?

How I then travel from Miss Marple to Carlo Ginzburg is unclear. Is it the detective analogy that is so often used to describe’s Ginzburg’s work? Is it noting that empathy toward one’s characters is not something an historian studying witches in the XIVth century can afford, but remembering that arousing the reader’s empathy toward unknowns’ histories –microhistories- is how Ginzburg intends to restore justice and truth in history? Is it directly because of his awareness of the relationships of history to litterature (taken from this interview)?

TRG: Would it be correct to say that one of those challenges confronting history is its relationship with literature? You have often written of your interest in the modernist tradition. But literary modernism’s critique of the traditional representations of reality is frequently adduced as one of the chief examples of the impossibilities inherent in traditional historical projects.

CGinzburg: To me, that is yet another artificial contradiction. To regard history and literature as two wholly disparate fields is both mistaken and unhistorical. They have always existed in dialogue, more or less overlapping. The fact that historical writing sometimes devolves into fiction and that, furthermore, it often relies on literary models, should not surprise us. A much more challenging approach – to history and literature alike – is to start out from the fact that both disciplines share an obligation to the truth, and to see how this has been lived up to at different times. I consider literary modernism first of all as an attempt to discover new forms of truthfulness, not least on a formal plane. In that respect it is highly relevant to me as an historian.

Every literary device – be it in a fictional or historical text – makes reality visible in its own way, conveys its vision of reality. Specific linguistic forms are related to specific forms of truth, one might say. There is a kind of formal constraint at work here ­- every literary form forces us to discover one thing and ignore something else. The traditional narrative, for example, has its own innate limitations, it imposes a kind of sequential contstraint: something has to come first, something else later. When I wrote The Cheese and the Worms, I dreamed of writing the whole book on one gigantic page, so that I could escape this straitjacket. It was, of course, a ridiculous idea. But the literary form employed by the historian will always be one of the two central filters that separate the historical work from the reality it sets out to portray. The other filter is the sources themselves. Both these filters in reality imply an infinite number of potentially distorting factors. In that way, the idea of a simple historical narrative is as absurd as the idea of irrefutable historical proof.

TRG: Ever since you published your very first scientific treatise, you retained your own highly distinctive style of writing and composition. Your texts are structured in series of freestanding paragraphs or short chapters, which gives the writing a disjointed, essay-like character, even in a large work like Ecstasies. What induced you to adopt such a style ?

CGinzburg: I came across this way of setting out material when, as a young man, I read an essay by Luigi Einaudi, a distinguished economist and economic historian who eventually became president of Italy. He was the father of Giulio, the well-known publisher. The essay was constructed as a series of numbered paragraphs ­- a device which appealed to my own fascination with cinema and montage. Montage corresponds to what I consider to be the constructive element in historical studies: it makes it clear that our knowledge is fragmentary and that it derives from an open process. It has always been my ambition that the uncertainty of the research process should come through in what I write ­- I try to portray my own hesitation, so to speak, to enable the reader to make his own judgement. Historical writing should aspire to be democratic, by which I mean that it should be possible to check our statements from without, and that the reader be a party not only to the conclusions arrived at but also to the process that led to them.

From Leonard to Miss Marple and Miss Marple to Ginzburg, the relationships of historians to litterature is a fascinating one

Reading some of the comments on a previous post of this blog, I can’t escape thinking that there still exists, even among the members of our community – by “our” community, I don’t mean historians of economics in general, but more narrowly, postmodern and SSK-inflected historians of economics (whatever that is) -, some misunderstandings related to what postmodern thought is, to its influence on the history of science and on SSK. Words such as “postmodernism” and “relativisn” can be used in a quite loose – and sometimes harmful – way. I will not pretend here that I have more knowledge than anyone on that matter, but I know at least one person who does: Barbara Herrnstein Smith. Professor Smith has been trained in psychology, literary criticism and cultural theory and those who haven’t read my review of Stanley Fish’s Save the World on your Own Time, will surely wonder what literary criticism has to offer to those who study the history of economics. The answer is: a lot, actually.

In her last book, Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth and the Human (2005), Smith elucidates, in less than 200 pages, some of the questions we are asking ourselves on this blog, with unequaled accuracy, thoughtfulness and what I would call a jubilatory bent for intellectual jousting. This is hardly Smith’s first endeavour in the field of the History and Philosophy of Science. Her previous book, Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy (1997) dealt with the same kind of material. Though she proudly acknowledges she is no philosopher, nor is she a social scientist, Smith is a fine reader of science. It is no secret that she is herself a radical relativist/constructivist but the power of her analysis comes from her ability not only to criticize, but also to understand the point of view of those who try to beat postmodernism. She can literally strip her opponents’s arguments to the bone, as to reveal how empty and meaningless they are. If you intend to contradict her, then, choose your words carefully! I will not detail the book chapter after chapter as I did for Fish’s essay, but I will try to give you a hint of a material that certainly repays study.

The general objective of the book is to revisit two decades of science wars and to review all the harms that have been made on contemporary cultural theory and behavioral sciences, tracking the last bits of anti-relativism and positivist philosophy in newspapers articles, feminist writings and recent works in evolutionary psychology. The author does not think that all people criticizing postmodernism are idiots. In her opinion, indeed, most of them are doing interesting – if not fascinating – things but they are also misled by unjustified preconceptions on constructivism. To contradict these authors, Smiths appeals to what she calls pre-postmodern relativists such as Ludwig Fleck and Carl Becker.

The meaning of the title is dual: it refers both to the fact it is often said that “knowledge, or the problem of knowledge, is the scandal of philosophy” (1) and to all the scandalized critiques of postmodernism, which assert that the latter is a threat against the highest values of our society: the ability of making moral and aesthetic judgements, the possibility of scientific progress and nothing less that the pillars of Western democracy. Smith’s response to that critique is that in fact, relativism is an attack against one and only one thing, traditional (i.e. positivist and judgemental) philosophy. But, as Smith observes: “[w]hile it is not clear that the scandal matters to anyone but philosophers, philosophers point out that it should matter to everyone … [f]or, they explain, unless we can ground our claims to knowledge as such, which is to say distinguish it from mere opinion, superstition, fantasy, wishful thinking, ideology, illusion or delusion, then the actions we take on the basis of presumed knowledge – boarding an airplane, swallowing a pill, finding someone guilty of a crime – will be irrational and unjustifiable” (ibid.).

This is a rather serious claim. In chapter 2, Smith illustrates some examples of the implications of it in recent controversies, examining Deborah Lindstadt’s thesis that postmodern theory is responsible for the rise of Holocaust denial (a thesis that has been given credit by other academics and journalists) and Edward Rothstein’s contention that the same stream of skepticism has been discredited by 9/11. She observes that such sets of linkages are generally based on no actual quotation from postmodern thinkers. “Who among the figures commonly associated, properly or improperly, with ‘postmodern’ theory maintains that all truth is subjective or that one man’s narrative is as good as another’s? Michel Foucault? Jacques Derrida? Jean-François Lyotard? Hayden White? Richard Rorty? Stanley Fish? David Bloor? Bruno Latour? Actually, of course, none of these” (20). The real problem, she suggests, is that those who support such misleading conclusions often do so because they want to sustain values that they consider beyond scrutiny: “A denunciation of relativism amounts to a demand for dogmatism – for predetermined judgement armoured against new thought” (23).

Smith also points out that many disparaging commentaries on relativism are made by people who often happen to be relativist in the sense actual relativists define it (she illustrates this paradox by quoting from feminist theorician Donna Haraway and from … Proust !). She shows that debates similar to those who appeared at the end of the twentieth also occurred in the 1920s and in the 1930s as Albert Einstein, Virginia Woolf or Pablo Picasso were often linked to the more perilous evil of those times: Bolshevism. In fact, she observes, there existed an important stream of pre-postmodern relativism, represented by people like John Dewey or Margaret Mead, during a period “marked by a confident positivism in the natural sciences and a related scientism in much academic philosophy”. Those original thoughts were mostly swept away by decades of “popular beliefs and cultural associations that made-up the Cold War; the global eruption of various radical social movements … ; and throughout the century, dramatic technological developments and widespread demographic shifts” (31). All those events fostered in the same way social conservatism and a “renewed … commitment to the idea and ideals of objectivity” (32).

Related to this historical context is Smith’s account of Fleck’s Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, published in 1935. Fleck’s book was overshadowed by a more popular one, Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery, published the same year. Fleck was rediscovered and praised by Kuhn and later by Latour (whose Pasteurization of France, Smith argues, is in some way a reinvention of Genesis and Development). Yet it is no surprise, given the peculiar intellectual environment of the early postwar period that Fleck was ignored and that scientists, in search of legitimacy, preferred the demarcating epistemology offered by Popper. In addition, Fleck was a Polish Jew whose work in chemistry did not draw the attention of Western scientists. He was arrested during the war and sent to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Nonetheless, he survived the war and emigrated to Israel, where he died in 1961. His conceptions in Genesis and Development were influenced by his practice of chemistry. The book tells the development of the Wassermann reaction, a chemical process that allowed for the detection of the syphilis pathogen. Fleck shows that the Wassermann reaction occured within the development of various beliefs, techniques, theories, methods, political and professional interests (yes, it sounds a lot like SSK !). The following passage, quoted by Smith (57), shows how radical Fleck’s relativism was:

It is true that modern doctrine is supported by much more sophisticated techniques of investigation, much broader experience, and more thorough theory. The naive analogy between the organs of both sexes has disappeared and far more details are at our disposal. But the path from dissection to formulated theory [and pictorial representation] is extremely complicated, indirect and culturally conditioned … In science, just as in art and in life, only that which is true to culture is true to nature.

In addition, Smith shows that Fleck also provided the demonstration that his conceptions of science had nothing to do with the idea that all theories are equally valid because the latter is actually the opposite of the assertion that “the validity of a theory depends on its position in a network of historically specific connections” (64). Smith observes that this justification is similar to Latour’s distinction between relative and absolute relativism.

I will not try to detail the rest of the book. Smith’s wordings are too precise and subtle to withstand summarization. Trying to reconstruct her thought would result in unproductive paraphrase. Nonetheless, I can’t finish this review without saying a few words on Chapter 6, devoted to Evolutionary Psychology. In this chapter, she addresses the claims of contemporary evolutionary psychology, whose most notable advocate is Steven Pinker. She shows that contrary to what evolutionary psychologists assert, the alternative to the claim that all human behavior – “from incest avoidance and female-adolescent anorexia to past-tense formation and a taste for Victorian novels” (130) – can be explained by our genes, is not dogmatic theology or ideologically driven humanities, but a set of more sophisticated models of development, such as those theorized by Susan Oyama in her book The Ontogeny of Information, giving rise to developmental or ecological psychology. Evolutionary psychologists such as Pinker operate within a mechanical conception of the brain, in which the latter is considered as an information processing computer. This conception rejects – or ignore – major works in biology which explain human behavior in terms of  interactions between cells and their environment (involving “complex social and perceptual coordination”, as well as “internal feedback mechanisms”). The relation between those issues and what has been studied earlier in the book is that evolutionary psychologists often strengthen their claims by discrediting alternative theories as dubious – if not dangerous – postmodernism. Frequently, those claims mistake constructivism for social constructivism (or social constructionism): they identify the claims of alternative theories as the idea that everything is socially/culturally constructed, whereas these theories  simply claim that there is no clear separation between nature and nurture. These distinctions are particularly rich and subtle and one is not even obliged to share Smith’s skepticism to examine them carefully. Those interested in the relations between economics and biology might want to give special attention to these debates.

In her course on “Biological Issues in Cultural Theory” at Duke University, Barbara Herrnstein Smith teaches graduate students in philosophy, theology and natural sciences that Bruno Latour has been the most important theorist over the last twenty-five years. If only to hear that once in my life, I think I have been fortunate to sit in on her class. I hope I have conveyed the pleasures one feels reading her writings, that his, the pleasures of being scandalized.

I’ve never been especially supportive of the attempt to describe academic professions by means of the market metaphor, which seems to me too narrow a frame. However, a recent piece by Neal Young, John Ioannidis, and Omar Al-Ubaydli caught my attention. They argue that – just like the winning bidder at an auction – the editors of scientific journals may be over-betting.

The average bid in an auction is likely to get close to a reasonably ‘true’ value. However, accurately predicting the value of a good affords no reward, because it is not the average bidder who wins. ‘The Winner’s Curse’ is a catchphrase suggesting that the winning bid in an auction must come from the bidder who holds the highest expectations about the present value of a good of uncertain value – which is very likely to be too high.

In Young et al.’s paper such good of uncertain value is ’scientific information’. They suggest that the more trials and repetitions have been conducted for a scientific study, the more likely it is that the scientific community comes to an agreement about its ‘true’ value. As in the auctions, however, these are not the results that get published in top-tier journals. Instead, editors may be biased to grant preferential publications to “extreme, spectacular results”. Regrettably, these results turn out to be ‘false’ all too often. Young et al. report that, of the 49 most-cited papers on the effectiveness of medical interventions published in top journals in 1990–2004, 25% of the randomized trials and 83% of the non-randomized studies had already been contradicted by 2005.

Given the artificial scarcity of good publication outlets, and the large supply of scientific papers, the market for scientific information is bound to fail. Oligopolistic editors serve as middle-men between the producers (scholars) and the consumers (other scholars, funding bodies, society-at-large) and bear minimal costs for their failure to select valuable scientific information. The curse, in other words, befalls the consumer. Who is, let me add, either in a weak position to fight back (if she is not a scholar herself and so suffers from asymmetric information) or in a conflict of interest (if she is a scholar).

The authors conclude that “there is a moral imperative to reconsider how scientific data are judged and disseminated”. Since when do market failures entail moral indignation? Perhaps this owes to the fact that only Al-Ubaydli is an economist, while Young and Ioannidis Medical Doctors and that the article has appeared on a medical journal.

To initiate the student in the practice and controversies of history, the LSE’s Economic History Department had us read E.H. Carr’s What is History?, originally the 1961 Trevelyan lectures at Cambridge U. That’s a while ago. One expects a terse piece dealing with some debate that have since been “obviously” resolved or obsessed by some minor quibble that made a generation squander time and effort. There is little of it: passing protest about Oxford scholars and a passionate disdain for Professor Butterfield (the one that coined “whig” history), Isiah Berlin and Karl Popper. The pages of my copy were yellowed by the Cold War, Carr was a scholar of Soviet history. Yet, the text feels surprisingly fresh and current. Not like 1961 methodology of economics, or economics proper, sciences of “progress.” Carr’s defense of “causal history” feels a bit overstressed – looking for causes to rank them and identity interconnections; but I did not feel tempted to suggest any editing. I found some bits useful for my polemics. As when he writes,

To describe something as mischance is a favorite way of exempting oneself from the tiresome obligation to investigate its cause and, something tells me that history is a chapter of accidents, I tend to suspect him of intellectual laziness or low intellectual vitality. — p. 102.

Carr is superb in his discussions of history in relation to morality, to biography and the dramatis personae, to the dialogue of past, present and future.

How can that be? How can problems of history feel so much the same? Is there no progress in history? Are there no major quandaries in the theory of history after we’ve settled into a moderate materialism and sociologism? Carr knew the answer in 1961. History is not about method development or the reaching up for some Truth. It’s an open ended labour of imagination and curiosity, playing past, present and future in a mutual construction. History is the celebration of change. Party on!

On the 15th of December of 1969 “an anarchist and railway employee named Pino Pinelli dies by falling from the window of the office of Police Superintendent Luigi Calabresi, on the fifth floor of the Milan police headquarters, where he had been detained for three days.” The story is vividly dramatized in Dario Fo, The Accidental Death of an Anarchist (part 1, part 2).

Carlo Ginzburg is one of the great masters of history writing. In 1991, the medievalist scholar of witchcraft trials wrote a book about a ongoing court case – The Judge and the Historian. His friend Adriano Sofri, a former leader of the autonomist group Lotta Continua, was on trial as mastermind of the murder in May 1972 of Superintendent Luigi Calabresi. Ginzburg’s book is a lesson on the use of evidence. Reading the transcripts of the trial, and the record of testimonies, Ginzburg reveals contradictions, the interpretative shortcuts of the judge, the lapses of the carabinieri that express their interference, and finally how evidence was weighted and distorted to justify a heavy sentence. One would think that the historian should reconstruct events, urgently tying actions to individual motives. Ginzburg calls it a “judicial model” and rejects it. Unlike the judge, the historian aims at a larger interpretative frame, studying the courtroom drama as “historical experimentation” where evidence, the document, is being actively produced by the interactions of officials, lawyers, witnesses.

The historian shows the judge gets it wrong. The accused were falsely condemned in a new witch hunt. Reading the book more than fifteen years after its publication, I can’t shake a feeling of powerlessness at the indignation of the intellectual. Sofri and his comrades languish in jail, the former is gravely ill. Ginzburg in all his brilliance cannot save the world.

I made this piece a standalone contribution instead of a comment to Tiago’s post on Blogs, mainly for its length and for increased visibility (see why below). As Tiago points out, “most of the action in blogs happens tucked away in the comments sections” and their “social/collaborative dimension is the one with the greatest potential to change, to improve and to make a profound intellectual impact.” I agree, but let me stress that their social/antagonistic dimension must not be underplayed. After all, who doesn’t love a heated economic squabble? The progress of economics has been marked by debates about mercantilism, socialist calculation, marginalism, monetarism, rationality assumptions…

Blogs empower (almost) real-time debates. (For the sake of comparison: though Mises’ 1920 seminal article surely received early responses, Lange’s challenge came in 16 years later, and Hayek’s contributions to the socialist calculation debate went on well into the 60’s.) Of course, debates can linger on for years even in the digital arena, too. And, at any rate, debates do not simply pop up because there is a convenient way to debate (though that helps).

All this lengthy introduction to make just two points:

i) Indeed, blogs should be better (understood and then) valued for their contribution to the advancement of the discipline. Yet, I agree with Tim Kane that “it’s still probably not advisable for graduate students or junior faculty to blog instead of focus on tenurable research … for now”.

ii) There should exist some way to transfer the livelihood of blogs and real-time debates into academic journals. In fact, there exists one I know of. So, the increased visibility of a standalone post is to promote a brand new graduate journal: the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics.

The only thing graduate about the journal is that the three editors (Tyler DesRoches, Luis Mirels-Flores, and Tom Wells) are graduate students at EIPE. Other than that, it is an extraordinary product of the highest academic standards… with several extras:

* Aris Spanos’ ten pages worth of fierce reviewing/bashing of McCloskey and Ziliak’s latest book on statistical significance. And, of course, the even fiercer fighting back of the authors.

* Maurice Lagueux’s provocative dissecting of Don Ross’ new book on microexplanation, with Don Ross’ own reply.

* Cristina Marcuzzo’s inaugural address as this year’s President of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought.

* An underrated means for conveying histories, stories, and ideas: an interview with Uskali Mäki.

* Summaries of recent PhD dissertations in the history and philosophy of economics.

… and much more.

I followed closely the early developments of the journal, but I admit to not having seen coming anything this good, really. If you think this is petty marketing, be informed that the entire EJPE project is open access. So, stop reading this already, and go take a look at the first issue.

Is there a lab-field distinction in economics?

This is what I kept wondering while reading Robert E. Kohler’s Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology (University of Chicago press, 2002).

This is a great book: mastery of primary and secondary literature over the 1880-1950 period (he makes extensive use of the 32 archive funds he consulted), and a narrative line full of confidence, alternating between detailed demonstrations and illuminating comments.

Kohler’s general point is that practitioners of natural history, whose main place of work was the field, struggled to retain a legitimacy when the laboratory emerged as the place where scientific facts were crafted. In the field, you don’t control for anything, so that your observations can hardly be repeated and your variable of interest cannot be isolated. Plus, you might actually experience pleasure walking in the field, which is dangerous if your concern is serious science, rather than leisure.

A modern-day naturalist

As Kohler explains, naturalists first adopted a self-defeating strategy: they endorsed the ideals of the lab practices, and they tried to emulate them in the field. Of course, the result was that a lot of second rate experiments were performed, and many careers suffered from this. Later on, around the 30’s, biologists in the field set a more autonomous agenda for themselves. Thanks to very intensive data-collecting (Ernst Mayr, Robert Whittaker), or by developing “big science” projects (the Odums brothers), field practices could reclaim scientific credentials.

So Kohler concludes on a cautious optimistic note, tending to think that by the 50’s, a shared and legitimate space emerged between the field and the lab (I would be more inclined to say that the naturalist’s struggle for an identity continued as hard, in different modes).

In parallel, I am reading in the history of experimental economics (starting with Kyu Sang Lee PhD dissertation). And I was wondering: is there an equivalent of a lab-field distinction in economics? Labs there are, but the field? Markets, of course… but where do you find them? My intuition is that experimental economics could have created the field it was supposed to test, like in a performative act (I’ve to check a book precisely on that). Labs coming before the field… that would raise interesting issues.

[in contrast, this would conform to a more traditional view of the lab/field partition in economics]

In his last book, Save The World On Your Own Time, Stanley Fish makes a compelling plea for a value-free academic world which would be only oriented toward true academic goals, the pursuit of knowledge and its transmission to the students. This is a very provocative statement, isn’t it ? Well, though I can already hear the howls of indignation coming, I will argue that, in a perfect world, this thoughtful and persuasive essay should not be provocative at all. But let me just detail the book’s content.

Fish’s main argument in this book is that how laudable are the ideals of a tolerant and peaceful society, which would foster democracy and struggle against gender discrimination and economic oppression (among others), this should not be the true purpose of an institution of higher learning to promote them. When professors offer themselves as moralists or political activists, they do not only waste their time; they also abdicate their true role: that of advancing knowledge among the students population by means of carefully chosen teaching materials and pedagogical virtue (indeed, one of the only “virtues” that has its place in a university). Though the book itself contains seven chapters (plus an introduction), it is mainly articulated around three ideas.

• do your job

• don’t try to do someone else’s job

• don’t let anyone else do your job

According to Fish, the only job which is relevant here is “a) introduce students to bodies of knowledge and traditions of inquiry they didn’t know much about before, and b) equip those same students with the analytical skills that will enable them to move confidently within those traditions and to engage in independent research should they choose to do so” (p. 18). That does not mean that political and current questions cannot be brought into the classroom, but in order to be relevant, those questions have to be “academicized”. “To academicize an issue is to detach it from those contexts where it poses a choice of what to do or how to live … and insert it into an academic context where it invites a certain kind of interrogation” (p. 170). Instead of asking ourselves if Barack Obama is right or wrong, we can analyze (grammatically, rhetorically …) his discourse and ask whether he is compelling or not, without offering a judgement on the political ideas that are at stake. Doing the latter, argues Fish, would transform the classroom into the kind of sterile TV show students can quietly watch at home, and would provide no advancement of knowledge. Then, Fish tackles the two main criticisms which could be made about his statement: the idea that everything is political and that you cannot totally separate your analysis from your opinion on the question. About the first criticism, Fish argues that it is crucial to make a distinction between the academy politics and the partisan politics. Whereas the latter is about social goals and international relations, the former is about the good interpretation of a poem, or the relevant choice of a textbook. Those can involve some harsh debates, even harsher that debates over death penalty or abortion, Fish argues, and they are the only debates which should be allowed in the classroom. And about the second criticism, Fish argues that separating analysis from judgment is what we do all the time if we want to behave in society. If I go to my best friend’s son’s Bar Mitzvah, I am not going to address the audience with a discourse on the evils of Israel’s policy in the Middle-East, even if I’m a zealous defender of the Palestinian cause (shall I precise here that the example is mine, not Fish’s !).

Stanley Fish, Photo by Barney Cokeliss

But what about free speech and democracy, which (almost) everybody regards as utterly important values, shouldn’t they be fostered in the classroom? Fish’s answer in the second part of his argument – don’t try to do someone else’s job - is unequivocal. It’s a no. Democracy and free speech are only political values, and not academic ones. Democracy, for example, is the idea that everybody’s voice weighs the same in our society, but it’s not true in a university. Teachers teach, students learn and administrators manage. That students take the same part as administrators in the numerous administrative tasks involved in the functioning of a university might not be a very good idea. As for freedom of speech, Fish argues that it is very different from academic freedom. The idea that any opinion must be valued is indeed totally opposite to the goals of the academy. Actually, only true and endured opinions, ones that can be demonstrated or rationally discussed, have their place in the university. That a professor, as a citizen, must be protected by the First Amendment is incontestable, but within the university this right is limited by the ability of this professor to do his job. Thus, academic freedom is only the freedom of pursuing the research of truth and the advancement of knowledge, not the freedom of offering any political view to the classroom without analytical insight. Fish provides many interesting examples of how a university should (or should not) react to the political events of the day, especially when they involve students or faculty members, including a very fine understanding of the issues at stake during Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech at Columbia.

This brings us to the third part of Fish’s argument. If professors do not do their job or try to do someone’s else job, they will end up being despised by people outside of the academy, who will pretend they can do the job as well. Businessmen, opinion leaders, politicians and lobbyists argue that the faculty offers a biased leftist point of view and that ideological and political balance should be introduced in the university, by being open to a different set of ideas. They denounce gender and race studies and plead for creationism. The irony of some arguments does not escape Fish’s mind. Coming mostly from the right wing, those activists often use a very vulgar conception of post-modernism, a movement they abhor and long tried to fight,  to enforce their conservative political views. According to them, post-modernism is teaching that no theory can be held to be true, so that every opinion should be valued on an equal footing. But Fish argues that this is a very bad understanding of what post-modernism is. “Postmodernism is a general and abstract description of the way knowledge is established and challenged. It tells us that any establishing or challenging of knowledge is a historical rather than a transcendent event” (p. 134). But historical contingency has nothing to do with scientific relativism, because “[y]ou can be persuaded by postmodern arguments on the very general level of their usual assertion … and you can still hold firmly to judgments of truth, accuracy, correctness, and error as they are made in the precincts of some particular realm of inquiry” (ibid.). Holding against those who argue that post-modernism is the denial of scientific knowledge, Fish claims that, on the contrary, this conception of knowledge shares the same properties than the values which should be at the core of the academy: it serves no political or ideological views and it is totally useless to society in general.

This brings Fish to the last point of his reflection. Because the true purpose of liberal education is merely to give students a hint of the advancement of knowledge in any given discipline, it has almost no cash value for the society as a whole. It does not make better men and women, just men and women with better analytical skills. It does not contribute much to the national product; sometimes it does not even help people find a job. The question is: how can you raise funding with such a discourse? The answer provided by Fish is deceptively simple: you can’t. But if you pretend that higher education can have any practical interest for the rest of the world, you end up managing your university like a business and consequently undermine the true beauty of academic activity: its fundamental uselessness.

Fish’s book is not flawless. Some of his examples are a bit far-fetched (when he tries to “academicize” the question of whether George W. Bush has been the worst president of the United States ever). Elsewhere, there are some contradictions. For example, he could have eschewed writing he voted for Gore in 2000 and for Kerry in 2004 to counterbalance arguments that some may find too conservative. At the end of the book, his defense of the academy makes him write that most faculties are ideologically unbiased, which is a bit contradictory with some examples he introduced before.

But overall, I think that Save The World On Your Own Time makes a fascinating read. This is particularly timely regarding the current status of our discipline. Historians of economics often offer themselves as moralists and political activists, denouncing the evils of free markets, of mathematical reasoning and general equilibrium model-building or pretending that the world would be in a better shape if economics had stopped its development after a) Aristotle, b) Adam Smith, c) John Stuart Mill or d) Friedrich Hayek (you can choose your favorite one). They desperately try to prevent their students from investigating the topics they find “morally hazardous” – meaning: opposite to their own conception of moral -, reducing fascinating scientific debates to mere ideological wars. This temptation is obvious in conferences, on the HES list (now SHOE) and even sometimes on this blog (particularly in the comments section). But if historians of economics do not do their job – which consists in writing the history of economics – and try to do someone’s else job, who’s going to do theirs?

Stanley Fish (2008), Save The World On Your Own Time, New York: Oxford University Press, 189 pages, incl. index and  a selected bibliography.

In the last issue of Modern Intellectual History, one of the journal that I encourage you to look at from time to time I stumble upon an interesting review article by Daniel Geary. In this piece, he makes a distinction between “discipline history” and “intellectual history”, a distinction he borrowed from an earlier and interesting piece by S. Collini (the link is below). According to Collini, “discipline history… offers an account of the alleged historical development of an enterprise the identity of which is defined by the concerns practitioners of a particular scientific field”. It is clear to me, and I assume to most of my readers, that a large portion of history of political economy or of its variants, history of economics and history of economic thought, is still discipline history. Collini (and Geary) contrasts this with “an approach which attempts to treat the history of the social sciences as part of a wider intellectual history”. I have always found the preoccupations of intellectual historians not so different from those of historians of science narrowly defined (that is excluding sociologist and philosophers of science).

There are however some interesting twists. First, though there was an early version known in the US under the label “history of ideas” (and linked to the Journal of the history of ideas), intellectual history in the modern sense is very much linked to the English context (although one of its founding father, Pocock, is an american). It blossomed in Cambridge (Quentin Skinner, Istvan Hont) and Sussex University (Donald Winch, Knud Haakonssen), among other locations. Second, modern intellectual history has originated to a large extent from the refounding of the history of political ideas/thought in the 1970s and 1980s. This may explain why it had, from the beginning, a deep interest in political economy (most notably in Smith and the Scottish enlightenment), and very few institutional links with historian of science. Third, while historians of recent economics have been more  open to history of science (broadly defined) as a heuristic model and to historians of science as people with whom to interact, historians of earlier periods, in a nutshell pre-marginal revolution, have been more likely to talk with and be influenced by intellectual historians. I wonder why.

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayIssue?jid=MIH&volumeId=5&issueId=02&iid=1921364

http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k365248f

He was born in a Jewish family in the Middle-West.

He is said to be brash and never bothers being mean with lesser mortals.

Part of his work is said to be a synthesis of some others’ contributions, rather than a fully original creation.

Some people think he’s a traitor to the political left’s cause he embraced in his youth.

He doesn’t really like historical accounts of his life and prefers reinventing his own history.

But in spite of all these controversies, it is rather difficult to deny him genius, acute intelligence and an amazing sense of humor and self-derision. All in all, he is considered as one of the greatest minds of the past century.

For all these reasons, we can think there are some similarities between Bob Dylan and Paul Samuelson.

But here is an excerpt of Dylan’s Chronicles that I find particularly striking. At the end of the 1980s, while he is in New Orleans, in the process of recording one of his masterful albums, Oh Mercy, with Canadian producer Daniel Lanois, Bob (re)discovers a way of playing  guitar that, he thinks, might change his life (it’s pages 158-161 of the paperback edition, emphasis added):

The system works in a cyclical way. Because you’re thinking in odd numbers instead of even numbers, you’re playing with a different value system … I had too long been freeze in the secular temple of a museum anyway. It’s not a complicated thing. There are thousands if not millions of these patterns so you never run out of ideas. You’re always at some unexploited fixed point. It’s not a heavy theorized thing, it’s geometrical. I’m not that good at math but I do know that the universe is formed with mathematical principles whether I understand them or not, and I was going to let that guide me. My playing was going to be an impellent in equanimity to my voice and I would use different algorithms that the ear is not accustomed to. It should be, but it’s not.

Okay. That might sound a little bit confused and obfuscating … but I think I definitely love it ! And I think it captures the mathematical zeitgeist of the second half of the twentieth century quite well. I hope a music writer will write a piece like “Dylan as a positivist” in the near future.

Most of our works as historians of economics took for granted that there is a clear line between material elligible as economic ideas and theories and what is not, what is a fact of the history of economics and what is not. As a consequence, our community have considered exclusively or almost exclusively facts that belongued to the culture of writing (and even more narrowly to the scholarly writings): texts, correspondence, etc. As a consequence, we know very little about the impact that other means of communication like cinema, TV, pictures to take a few examples might have on the economic conceptions of people (including economists, including us!). Another way to put it is: could we interpret movies, pictures, work of arts, etc., as (at least some of the time) carrying economic knowledge, concepts, even theories?

The immediate cause of this post was this picture taken from a book I recently bought (and read).

This famous photography was taken by Dorothea Lange as part of the Farm Security Administration 1930s project of providing a pictorial history of the United States in the economic depression. The original caption of his picture was the simple and descriptive: “Plantation Overseer and his fields hands, near Clarksdale Mississipi 1936″.

However, in the book I have, the co-authors (including Roy Striker who headed the project back in the 1930s and was trained as an economist) introduced the picture with a text in bold and big characters placed on the top left of the page (the picture is in the middle and caption is placed underneath in small characters) which reads:

There are pictures that say labor
and pictures that say capital
and pictures that say Depression.

My questions are: Do you think that there are pictures that say such things? Moreover, can we think of this particular picture as saying capital? And finally, can we see economics?

PS: I say that because most of the readings of this picture are linked to race inequality rather than social/economic inequality (see for example: http://caraf.blogs.com/caraf/2006/11/sfdhghgfdhgfhd.html)

By the way, the book title is: In This Proud Land, it was first published in 1973, I warmly recommend it to everyone.

People keep asking me whether my work is internalist, externalist, or a bit of both (neither doesn’t seem to be an option). I confess here and now that I never really know what the difference is between the two. Internalist to me refers to being or remaining within something, externalist must have to do with outside that something. But then I can’t figure out what that something is. From the way these questions are posed I gather that that something must be somehow externally defined. That is, it seems that I can’t decide myself whether a particular argument or story-line is internal or external. However, there’s no authority to be found defining that something that consitutes the inside. Help me out here guys, what is or could be the difference?