The Forest and the Tree

Every six months or so, I find myself reading parts of Phil Mirowski’s Machine Dream…and a few –sometimes angry- reviews of the book. That’s the thing when someone is ambitious enough to write his version of postwar economic history as a whole. Whatever you research on in this period, you end up confronting some of his claims (from this book or his recent work on the Chicago School and the Mont Pelerin Society).

Most reviewers eventually address the same issue, namely the consistency of Mirowski’s collective history with the various individual histories they have produced (Boland’s review is characteristically titled “zoomed-in vs zoomed-out”). Sometimes relying on archival sources, they fault Mirowski for overestimating the influence of such funding body or military organization on the individuals they have worked on (or on themselves, see Binmore’s review), or for caricaturing them as laqueys of Von Neumann or Hayek. And yes, I confess being hurt by his rough picture of such and such character I’ve lived with for years, reading their articles, drafts, private correspondence, diaries and most intimate thoughts.

But is there any road from individual to collective history? Is there any positive counterpart to the word “caricature,” a way of selecting a few characteristics from each individual, some that would together account for the shape of economic science, without distorting individual pictures of these individuals? Or do those willing to write collective history start the other way round, from these global forces that inform, filter and possibly distort individuals’ intellectual development? And how are these forces to be selected, if not on the basis of individual cases? Is collective history essentially a puppet history?

HOPE’s 2007 conference on biography and autobiography brought the question to light, but provided no answer to my obsessive question:

Is the kind of individual history I’m trying to write of any help to fashion the big picture?

Summing it all

Who’d have guessed it was Irving Fisher who summarized it all?

Of all the great mysteries the greatest to me is the mystery of history. Science explains the conditional, what would happen under different circumstances, but it does not explain the actual, what does and did happen. When and how was the great machine we call the Universe set going and why was it prearranged in the particular way it was, so that out of it must have come all that did come out and will come out down to the minutest details…. Whatever its meaning, of one thing I am convinced: That it is for us to approve and not to disapprove….. What we call mistakes are deviations from our provisional programs…. And so let be all the illness and disappointments with which my cup of Fate has been filled, and so let come what will come!

Quoted in Dorothy Ross (1991), The Origins of American Social Science, p.185

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. 

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?

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.

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.

 

Speaking to the dead

Yesterday, the guest of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart was P J O’Rourke [video here]. He was there pitching his latest book: On the Wealth of Nations, a book about Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.

I am not one to treat the “old masters” as a professional treasure, in need of constant attention and shelter. Nonetheless, I found O’Rourke disturbing, and not just for his nervous attempts at being funny. O’Rourke was “channeling” Smith. No one cares much about what O’Rourke thinks, so questions were posed to Smith. And O’Rourke diligently communicated the great Scot’s updated views on the sub-prime debacle, fiscal stimulus and the like.

I protest not because it’s unscholarly, but because it’s cryptic.

The library online

Writing history evokes images of shuffling dusty papers, and pencils scribbling over yellow pads. Yet, history is a technology intensive activity as any other academic field. A recent New Yorker article makes this point neatly, recalling how cataloguing, note taking and referencing are devices to manage the flood of information.

It is now common knowledge that a new kind of library is in the making. Google has publicized its desire to scan the major libraries of the world and make books electronic. You can search titles and text in Google Book Search, and despite being a blunt tool prone to error, it testifies to the decreasing cost of bibliometrics. To turn books into strings of data has never been easier. The same is happening to newsprint, the New York Times has its archives available for public view.

The new media promises ease and access, if one knows the way around the new frontier lands. Fortunately, there is D-Lib an online magazine focused on the subject of digital libraries. Demand creates supply?

One historian, one narrative

Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge was one of the first books I read in graduate school. No fault of my supervisor or my school, I was convinced. From thereon “grand narratives” were horrid beasts that trampled historical detail.

Cherishing this obsession of mine, it seems that every other paper I read hand waves a grand narrative (to be replaced in the author’s next paper). As the dials of the kaleidoscope turn, we see variations of the same theme, familiar tales. It goes that: economist x was forgotten or misunderstood and from this capital sin economics never recovered. It is unfair to claim that all history of economics is of this “negative whiggish” kind, a history of missed progress. But there is enough of it to create the expectation that an historian is a steward of the present as past.

I have wanted to ignore this performative demand. But laboring small tales at my workshop doesn’t seem enough. In seminars and referee reports I am asked for grand ideas. So, I am issuing an open call for an all encompassing narrative. Candidates please apply.

Klein on neoliberalism

To promote a book must be exhausting. The author, fresh-faced, smiling and clever, must fence questions from the media, from morning to evening, on radio, TV and print. For the public it isn’t easy either. After a week watching Alan Greenspan chatting his way from 60 minutes to the Daily Show, it is now Naomi Klein’s turn with The Shock Doctrine (next week: Paul Krugman).

On TV, Klein had to settle for C-SPAN, interviewed by New Republic’s Frank Foer. The conversation was not thorough or deep, Foer was too anxious eye-balling the camera between sentences and attempting an insincere critical distance. But the interview was long, and one gets from it a sense of Klein’s argument, close even to a retelling of her book’s anecdotes and narrative chain.

Elsewhere, Klein’s book has been favorably reviewed by Joseph Stiglitz in the New York Times, but other major newspapers have still to give it attention. In Britain, Klein’s daily Guardian was impressed, but the weakly Guardian (i.e. Observer) was furious. The charting of opinion is as curious as the book itself.