Why Do Historians of Economics Hate Social Studies of Science?

This was the title of one of the plenary session held in the 2008 HES conference. At the bar were: Esther-Mariam Sent who explains that lots historians of economics hate SSK and that it was neither nice nor very clever. Tim Leonard who said something but I can remember what exactly. Ivan Moscati who talks about his disbelief in SSK and that it was being clever to do history of economic analysis and heterodox economics. Ross Emmet who made a case for the linguistic turn. Steve Medema who said that as an editor as well as a human being he believed in diversity in opinions. Although I am simplifying a lot (which is not nice for the participants), one could grasp that I was not impressed by the general tone of the interventions - as well as by most of the remarks made by the public. And because this post was inspired by a lunch discussion I had just after the session with Pedro and Floris, I would use Q&A to explain my point of view.

Why? Simply because I think that the real issue was not really put on the table.

What is the real issue, then? Historicity.

What do you mean by that? The bare fact that as an historian of economics, I am convinced that what is really important when speaking of my working method is history, not economics or social science.

What do you mean by that (again)? I mean that as an historian of economics, I am constructing historical narratives and that to construct (what I believe) meaningful narratives I sometime refer to the social constraints that exist on the actors of science/economics (social class,  culture, etc.) and other times I believe that it is necessary to refer the theoretical discussions the scientists actually had and take for granted that it is what matters.  In other words, as an historian of economics I do not love nor hate social studies of science or economic analysis, there are tools that I find sometimes useful and at other times irrelevant. When they are useful I certainly like them, but when I believe them not pertinent in my narrative, I dislike them.

So I suppose that you believed that this session was not pertinent? Exactly. I would go even further, I believe it was to some extent counter-productive. When listening to the interventions, I felt that most of us were simply recreating an old and uninstering debate about what is more important in the development of economics: the internal (history of economic analysis) of the external (SSK) factors? Let me ask you something: when you are writing a paper on the history of economic analysis, do you sincerely believe that your hand is guided only by your social/cultural background?

No I don’t. OK, now, on the other hand, don’t you believe that this social/cultural background of you has no bearing on the topics you have chosen or the perspective in which you consider them?

Yes I do. You have said all that there is to it, young blood.

You are right, let’s go do some papers of HISTORY of economics now, because this is what I need to get me a (good) position.

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

The Future of HET, A Cartoon

Yesterday, I gave a lecture on the subject “History of Economic Thought and Economic Theory”. In thinking about their relation and in reflecting on the future of HET, I used this cartoon to illustrate what seems to be the current situation of our field:

(I’ve modified it slightly by adding the text “HET” in red).

Just sharing a funny cartoon…

Riddle

One can write a paper on economics disguised as history .

Can one write a historical paper, informing history, disguised as economics ?

Footnote to howl

Our profession seems to be delighted that the Journal of the History of Economic Thought is now published by Cambridge University Press. New publisher means new packaging. I have to say I really liked the Journal’s previous appearance, with its straight and clear layout and its elegant glossy paper, and I hope that those features will remain unchanged. Now, I am particularly impressed by the new cover, which reproduces what I assume to be one page of Marshall’s Principles of Economics. Yet we do not see the center of the page, which is hidden by the journal’s banner, but a footnote that contains a supply and demand schedule. Economic diagrams and various figures are often used to symbolize economics toward a larger audience - this blog is no exception - and they are consequently reproduced on a number of economics books covers. Marshall’s diagrams are doubtlessly among the great canonical figures in economics, they hold great historical significance, so I am not surprised that they have been chosen to represent history of economic thought. Yet we know that Marshall himself chose to put his economic diagrams in footnotes, because he considered them subsidiary tools that were not very helpful as expositional devices - think of the famous ‘Burn the Mathematics’ he addressed to Bowley. Marshall’s followers, on the other hand, gave much more importance to those elements. They took them out of the footnotes section and turned them into relevant working objects, on which the creation and diffusion of economic research heavily relied .

According to Wikipedia, “[f]ootnotes are most often used as an alternative to long explanatory notes that can be distracting to readers”. What do we want to tell about history of economics as a field when we use a footnote to symbolize it ? That contemporary economists should not bother with it because it could distract them from their own work ? Or that those seemingly useless footnotes, like Marshall’s diagrams, could become the material on which future research would be built upon ? Maybe this is too complicated and it actually means that historians of economics are the only people to bother themselves with old manuscripts, prefaces, appendices and footnotes …

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

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?

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.

@ 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.

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.

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.

Comic relief

The rumor is that the history of economics is headed towards extinction. Does that make me a Dodo?

The purpose of a blog

A prerequisite for academic quality is an environment of researchers that more or less conduct the same kind of research. The big difficulty that we (young) historians of economics often face is that we lack this appropriate academic environment. We can contact each other through e-mail, but cannot grab a coffee to discuss informally whatever it is we have on our minds. This blog partly aims to be this informal platform, but does it work? As yet, it seems it doesn’t, there’s no coffee discussion going on. Are people reluctant to put their quick remarks on the internet? Can a blog not be a substitute for face-to-face contact? Or is there simply no real urge to meet each other informally outside conferences and workshops?

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.