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Post-Autistic Economics Network |
from the post-autistic economics
review : issue no. 17, December 4, 2002 Economic
History and the Rebirth of Respectable Characters How long can irony and
cynicism sustain the economics profession?
When will we see the rebirth of the Intellectual, the Social Activist,
and the Teacher as respectable characters in the world of economics? (Arjo Klamer, 1990) I've been asked to name some
contributions that economic history can make to the Post-Autistic Economics
Movement. The occasion made me think
of the questions Arjo Klamer
asked in The Making of an Economist (Westview
Press, 1990: 185), his study with David Colander of graduate students at the universities
of Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and Yale. I thought of Klamer's
question - - how long till the rebirth? - - because in America, the study of
economic history was killed off with the Intellectual, the Social Activist,
and the Teacher. The timing was
ironic. I am not referring to the
literal killings in Paris or Budapest or Mississippi (though the connection
is worth exploring). The irony is that when Harvard cut a
full-year of history from the core of its graduate program in the 1960s (a
fashion that was completed at most schools, including Chicago, by the
mid-1970s), economic history was simultaneously and radically transforming.1 Historians at Harvard and Purdue were its
prime movers. It was a fantastic
re-invention of the field, and brought - - as such things go in the human
sciences - - a new methodology, a change of guard at the journals, and a
large increase in output, prestige, and resources. In 1993 two inventors of "the new
economic history," Robert Fogel and Douglass
North, were awarded the Nobel Prize.
Tragically, many economists could not say why. Economic history, then, is in one
story a victim and a failure. As
Deirdre McCloskey put it, the new economic historians had spent most of their
energy explaining to departments of history the "wonderful
usefulness" of economics.2
But they forgot to sell their wares to their own hiring and curriculum
committees--in economics. (McCloskey's
article was published in 1976 in the Journal of Economic Literature. She tried to stop George Stigler from
taking history out of Chicago's curriculum.)
Economic historians continue to speak in the wonderfully useful
language of statistics and constrained maximization. But to the Samuelsonians
of the Seventies who crafted the curriculum of micro-macro-and metrics while
fetching money to mathematize economics, the
numerate historians' talk of politics, religion, institutions, open fields,
lacks of freedom, legacies of slavery, narrative voice, contested meanings,
census manuscripts, personal diaries, and plantation account books was, to
use a technical term from the sociology of science, "humanities
crap." A real economist was a
Problem Solver, a calculus wonk. Economic history, then, like foreign
languages and the history of thought,
was killed when the Problem Solvers killed the Intellectual, the
Activist, and the Teacher–“the respectable characters.” It's difficult to imagine a re-valuation
and legitimization of these social roles - - so central to a post-autistic
economics - - without a simultaneous revival of historical inquiry. Now it's true that some people, loyal
to the new Chicago School, have called the ahistorical
Problem Solver, Robert Lucas, an intellectual. If you begin with standard Samuelsonian assumptions, then yes, Lucas is. If an intellectual is someone fastened to
the belief that there is one way of doing "operational" economics
"consistent with" real "science," if an intellectual (in
published work) has read mainly in some corners of engineering mathematics
and rational choice, free market economics, if an intellectual is a person
who does not value social or cultural history as a mode of economic
understanding, if an intellectual is someone unwilling to argue in his own
seminar his privileging of a simple utilitarian social welfare function (for
example, in Iowa City, Iowa, in 1994), then yes, Lucas is definitely an
intellectual. Similarly, under Samuelsonian assumptions, Robert Barro
is a Teacher, George W. Bush is an Orator, and Gary Becker is a Social
Activist (in Tantric healing). In other words, one contribution of
history to post-autistic economics is this: valuing economic history for the
serious economics it is (while retaining what it is now perceived to be:
serious history) will hasten to economics the return of the lost and
wandering tribes of respectable characters.
(One example of the potential gain can be found in Nicholas Dawidoff's The Fly Swatter [New York: Random
House, 2002]. It's an amazing and sad
story of the great economic historian, Alexander Gerschenkron,
who was twice forced to wander.) A
group of French students in the post-autistic movement have suggested a new
curriculum, setting theirs against present-day Chicago (PAE
Review 4, 29 Jan 2000). They propose
to put economic history back in to the core curriculum. Why should a post-autistic economist
study history? McCloskey's rubrics
from 1976 provide some of the answers: History
has more facts.
When today's economists begin a paper on America's Welfare Reform Act
of 1996 they of course introduce the subject historically. But because they do not collect facts from
history they get the facts wrong. The
Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP), which is
meaningful to me for many reasons, and partly because my brother is a research
affiliate with them, is unfortunately a good example. The IRP believes
that poverty and the collective strategies to eradicate it began with
President Johnson's War on Poverty.
(To be fair, some will refer to the Great Depression. But their data sets still begin in the
1960s.) America has had poverty and
public assistance since the Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601.3 In the late nineteenth century the largest
cities abolished "public outdoor relief"--the tax-financed
subsidies in cash and in kind. Abolition was part of the charity
organization movement, a British import that attempted to privatize,
moralize, scientize, localize, and personalize
poverty and charity. It's an open
secret that the 19th century experiment inspired today’s Republicans to
abolish entitlements. Data on the
failed movement are voluminous and contain evidence relevant to the Act of
1996.4 History
has better facts.
Economic historians - - for example, Simon Kuznets,
Eli Heckscher, John R. Commons, Lance Davis,
Stanley Engerman, Jeffrey Williamson, Susan Carter,
Richard Sutch, Roger Ransom, William Sundstrom, Gavin Wright, Warren Whatley, Claudia Goldin, Robert Margo, Emily Mechner,
Elyce Rotella, Lee Craig,
Ann Carlos, Dora Costa, Fernand Braudel,
Joel Mokyr, Yasukichi Yasuba, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Pierre Bourdieu, Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, Nancy Folbre, Kyle
Kaufmann, Thomas Weiss, Sam Williamson, Jeremy Atack,
Rick Steckel, John Murray, Joerg
Baten, William Collins, George Selgin,
Robert Higgs, Price Fishback, Shawn Kantor, Hugh Rockhoff, Peter Lindert, Avner Greif, Joan Hannon, Robert Humphreys, George Boyer, Mary
MacKinnon, Timothy Hatton, Cormac O'Grada, Richard Easterlin, Gus
Giebelhaus, Metin Cosgel, Mary Beth Combs, and Santhi
Hejeebu - - collect their own facts. You can see that it’s the industry
standard. Laboring
in the archives yields an intimate knowledge of the scope and limitations of
facts collected. Downloading a *.gif
file from www.economagic.com does not.
In our second look at significance testing in the American Economic
Review (this time we examined the 1990s) McCloskey and I found that among
all the subfields of economics, the historians and labor
economists pay most attention to the economic significance of their
estimates. History yields
better theory. What caused the Great Depression? A Problem Solver in the mid-1990s put to
paper one answer, and gave it to me: "a technology shock in a real
business cycle model." There is
in truth little consensus. But Milton
Friedman, Anna J. Schwartz, John Kenneth Galbraith, Peter Temin,
Charles P. Kindleberger, Barry Eichengreen,
and many other historians have advanced the theoretical conversation by
insisting their theory connect with actual world events. History makes
better policy. The history of welfare is a case in point:
"time limits" do not produce self-sufficient wages. But then, most economic policy is a
case in point. "The competitive
supply of professional services in the nineteenth century, it is said, grievously
injured consumers, justifying official cartels of doctors and
undertakers." So midwifery and
home birth have been virtually outlawed in the United States. "If marijuana were legally and
competitively supplied there would be a huge increase in demand for
it." Hey, I mean, look at that
Robitussin go! "The United States
will not lift the embargo on Cuba," President Bush told a crowd in Miami
in Spring 2002, "because that would make Castro rich and therefore more
difficult to remove." I just
got here, you can almost hear him dreaming. C’mon, America, give embargoes a chance. The rhetoric of Problem Solving needs
revising. What is the point of
emphasizing the size of the t-test, or formalizing the set of pooling equilibria, if history shows that you are solving the
wrong problem? A non-experimental
science ought to look at real world experiments when nature coughs them
up. For example, economists have much to learn about policy from East
and West Germany by looking at them when they were together, then separate,
then together again. Likewise in South
Africa and in Palestine. The labor economists David Card and Alan Krueger were not the
first to see `natural experiments' in the adoption of minimum wage
legislation; the method is old and historically sound. Still, the laboratory of history is
strangely under-utilized by the Problem Solver. History
makes better economists. Arjo Klamer and David Colander asked their sample of graduate
students to name the "most respected economists" (p. 42). At every school except Chicago, at least
half the heroes listed (there are no women on the lists) did their
significant work in historical economics: they are Smith, Marx, Veblen, Keynes, Hicks (part-time), Schumpeter, Myrdal, Polanyi, John Kenneth
Galbraith, and Friedman. And still
others on the list, such as Boulding, Sen, and Stigler, were deeply historical in the way they
conceived of economic problems.
Economic history is apparently a major field of inquiry for the
world's most respected economists. Economic history is
their major field because history offers more facts, better facts, better
theory, and better policy. But the
reasons for bringing history back in
exceed those that McCloskey raised against Stigler. Since that time a small but growing band of
economists and historians have allowed discourse, feminism, postmodernism,
and classical rhetoric to affect their work.
Like feminist economics and economic methodology, the conversations of
economic history are now more open and pluralistic. (Easy does it, Clio: it's not like trade
theory but we have a long way to go.)
History provides the alternative stories that give meaning to timeless
models and “obvious” nulls. History
exposes the contested meanings of utility, labor,
freedom, and justice. History keeps us
honest in our assumptions. History
connects teachers of economics to the concerns of the humanities. History connects teachers to the concerns
of minority and international students, and it connects students to the
assumptions and the graphs. For
example, when I introduce undergraduate students to externalities with Upton
Sinclair's The Jungle (1905), or to comparative advantage with
Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939), or to labor
economics with The Philadelphia Negro (1899), by W.E.B.
Du Bois, it is no surprise that women and students
of color become differently engaged. How can we bring history back
in? First: realize that Chicago and
Columbia do not set world prices for economic education. But when others think they do, distortion–autistic
economics--emerges. In fact, in
another story, economic history is not dead; it’s already back
in. Today’s core curriculum at
Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and Northwestern
University requires from Ph.D. students a satisfactory grade in a course on
economic history during the first or second year of study. It’s not like Gerschenkron’s
Harvard–a full-year of history--and it’s a lot of micro, macro, and metrics;
but clearly, in many of America’s elite programs, economic history is still inside
the core. What can we do? History stays out of the curriculum when
the Problem Solvers say “that’s not what MIT does.” Show the problem solvers that they are
wrong. Let it be known, moreover, that
economic historians are the department chairs at Harvard (Jeffrey Williamson,
1997-2000), Stanford (Gavin Wright, currently, and for a second time), MIT
(Peter Temin, 1994-1997), Northwestern
(Joel Mokyr, 1999-2002), Arizona (Price Fishback, currently), and elsewhere. These Department
Chairs are on your side. Second. I say we call out the
Chicago-Columbia-Harvard-MIT-Stanford-and Yale Ph.D.s who as students had
spoken honestly with Klamer and Colander and are
now writing and teaching as junior or tenured professors. It's time they speak up and say who they
are. Of the 212 respondents to Klamer's and Colander's survey in the late 1980s, 98%
said that a study of history was at least "moderately important"
and 68% said that history was of highest importance (Klamer
and Colander 1990, Table 2.1, p. 16).
Let me make a plausible out-of-sample observation. Not long ago a knowledge of history was
ranked by today's professors of economics as being of highest importance to
the skills of a good economist, second in importance only to
mathematics. (Seventy-three percent
[73%] said that mathematics was of highest importance [p. 16].) If the respondents have changed their
minds, if a knowledge of what Gerschenkron called
"economic backwardness in historical perspective” is not useful, if a
knowledge of the railroads, or the Poor Laws, or the Beveridge
Plan, or the gold standard, or slavery, or Jim Crow, or the East India
Company, or women's suffrage, or public education, or world war, or free
immigration, or markets before central banking is, they believe, no longer
important, they will of course agree to defend their change of mind at next
year's ASSA meetings. These are nameable professors who could
help to rescue the young from the autism of the middle and to repopulate the
world of economics with respectable characters. These professors are acquiring the power to
change the demand curve. They can
refuse to vote for the pseudo-mathematician, famous for formalizing nothing
of consequence. They can hire
economists who care about the world and its many ways of knowing, and who
show it in their teaching and their scholarship. They can fill the pages of economics with
the image they had of themselves when they were happy. But I am sorry to say with Nike that
an important way to bring history back in lies solely within you--the
obligation to just do it. There is a
simple proposition that clarifies my point.
If you are going to change the conversation, you have to change the
conversation. Inspired by the critical
pedagogy of Paulo Freire, the African American
writer and English professor, bell hooks, has made a similar point in Teaching
to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994). On the second day of classes I discuss with
my students her Chapter 10, "Building a Teaching Community," which
is a dialogue with a white male philosopher on the history and style of power
and knowledge in the classroom and how to change them. Students find the dialogue to be inspiring
(though sometimes unnerving) for claiming their own power, finding their own
voice, in my classroom. Students for a
post-autistic economics could take "education as the practice of
freedom" as a second motto, a kind of just-do-it. Education as the practice of freedom
means taking graduate courses in history and other historical sciences, such
as philosophy, biology, anthropology, or communication studies, and then
putting your questions to your teacher, your dissertation, and your seminar
speaker. It is simply not true what
department chairs say, and repeat, with liturgical command, "that there
is no time for those courses." Insisting to the young "that there
is no time" is at best an example of blackboard economics (but the costs
are of course higher than that). Ask,
What did Alex do? Your courage to forge your own path will inspire others to
do the same. Conventional teachers
will be angered and embarrassed by their ignorance and by the fragility of
their top-down and consumerist metaphors of power and knowledge. Who cares.
Science is criticism. They
should learn to take it. Your teacher
of labor economics may bark you off the podium when
you reveal to your classmates the private fantasies and the racist histories
of black people and public assistance that you found in The Bell Curve. Big deal.
How long should irony and cynicism rule the economics profession? |