Adam Smith Lives!

Canadian election today

Though I can no longer vote in Canadian elections -- like Peter Jennings, I'm still a Canadian citizen, but there's a residency requirement -- I'm anxious to see the results.  The CBC couldn't begin to discuss them until after 10 pm.  The blogs have all sorts of analyses; I like this one by Steve Gordon (a graduate student at UT while I was there) on the irrelevance of macro policy. 

Though I couldn't vote, I'm grateful that I could have done so were I living in Canada.  The post on J. S. Mill above gives one example of how economists have long been caught up in debates over the franchise and democracy.  Long after the extension of the franchise in America, F. A. Hayek reflected on our "delusion" about democratic politics in an 1978 interview with James Buchanan.  Mill figures prominently again (along with his father, and Jeremy Bentham): 

James Buchanan: "I think it would be useful to start off this discussion, if you would just talk about that a little. Why did we get involved in this sort of delusion (and I think it is a delusion), to the effect that somehow we didn’t need to worry about limiting government if, in fact, we could make the politicians responsible."

Hayek: "Well, I have been very much puzzled by this, but I think I have discovered the origin of this. It begins with the utilitarians with Bentham and particularly James Mill who had this conception that once it was a majority who controlled government, no other restriction in government [was] any longer possible. It comes out quite clearly in James Mill and, later in John Staurt Mill who once says, the people in, what’s his phrase, ‘the will of the people needs no control, if it’s the people who decide’."

Mill and the Ladies, or a historical look at the "feminist critique"

One of the liveliest debates I've seen continues to rage on the HES list.  For the most part, the focus is "Feminist critique" -- it began as a result of a post about anniversaries in which Becker's Economics of the Family was mentioned.  The issue, initially, was whether and how Becker's innovations then generated the Feminist Critique. But it's since moved on to encompass just what, precisely, the critique entails, as well such as less apparently related questions as whether economics is by-and-large characterized by utilitarian presumptions. 

Here's a post by Sumitra Shah, who began the "thorny thread":

Having started this thorny thread, I would like to send one last post on the subject: Becker did not design his economics for men or women. The criticism is not that it is ideological banter. He rigorously developed it based on the concept of the neoclassical economic agent, who is devoid of any socio-cultural characteristics. Hence his work misses the important dimensions that must be examined to come up with a meaningful theory of an institution such as the family. And he is an important economist, so the consequences of his work do matter. For feminist economists, the economic status of women is always a pressing concern; I am simply awed by their commitment.

Here's part of a posting by Nicholas J. Theocarakis: 

What is perhaps the most important aspect of the Beckerian project is the claim that the most important part of the different treatment of females in our economy and society is the result of rational decisions and that social norms and discriminatory perceptions do not matter.  ...  If social norms do not matter it is the objective characteristics of sex (e.g., fertility) that bring about different outcomes. Considerations of gender, i.e., the social construction of sex, according to this view, are irrelevant.  But perceptions of traits as "feminine" or "masculine" *are* important and this affects the acquisition of productivity-related traits during socialization and the assessment of individual productivity in the workplace.

I don't wish to comment on feminist economics.  Nor have I read the entire set of posts carefully.  You can find them here. But I do want to add that there is a broader historical dimension that has yet to be considered.  The treatment of "masculinity" and "feminity" -- from which Becker and others abstracted in this century -- has a rather dark side.  In the nineteenth century, political economists of such stature as J. S. Mill were "diminished" intellectually, by the claim that they were overly sentimental and "feminine", and therefore less-than-fully rational.  Their ideas were consequently also diminished in stature.  And when Mill defended the right of women to vote, he was criticized.  Two examples from the press are pasted in below. 

The point that sometimes gets lost as we think about cultural determinants of this and that is that, historically, the idea of difference was about "nature".  And, as David Levy and I have argued in The "Vanity of the Philosopher", "natural difference", historically, has meant "inferiority" (of gender, race, religion), with the awful policy results that followed -- paternalistic looking-after and denial of suffrage, direction, eugenics, slavery.  The return to homogeneity in this century denied these possibilities.

 

I used the Logic cartoon, by the way, for last year's Summer Institute t-shirt!  Am taking suggestions for this year's...!

I should add, as well, that a Judy cartoon -- reproduced in Mill's CW -- has Mill as a lady.  I don't have a scan of that one but will post it when I do.

The History of Economic Thought at the ASSAs

In recent years, the HES-sponsored sessions at the ASSAs have been terrific, and this year was no exception.  I missed the first because of some other obligations, but I heard good things about it:  "Mathematics, Economietrics and the History of Contemporary Economics", with papers by Judy Klein, Mary Morgan, Philippe Le Gall and Marcel Boumans.  The second, which I did attend, was on "Keynes' General Theory After Seventy Years", with papers by Robert Mundell, Bradley Bateman, Robert Dimand and Randall Wray.  Two sessions touched on Hayek: "The Postwar Origins of the Chicago School (60 years on)", featured papers by Philip Mirowsk and Rob Van Horn, Dan Hammond, Rob Van Horn and Bruce Caldwell; and the last (organized by me!), on "Buchanan and Hayel on the Constitutional Order", with papers by Pete Boettke and Clark Durant and by Peart and David Levy.  For each of the sessions I attended, the discussion was lively and the rooms were full, with some 35 participants in the smaller rooms and close to 80 in the larger (this, according to my rough counting).  I also noticed that, for my session at least, the crowd seemed younger than usual for a History of Economics session. That's a good sign!

For my session, I think the thing I came away with -- aside from "I need to do a great deal more work"! -- is that we (Levy and Peart) need to think more about what it means to talk about natural and artificial selection, and how and when discussion alters evolutionary processes.

If you are interested in organizing a session for next year's ASSA, think coherence and accessibility/interest (to the broad community of economists).  And think early.  The deadline comes soon!  Proposals should be sent to the VP of the HES, Jerry Evensky, at jevensky@syr.edu.  The CFP has just been sent to the HES list.   

Experts & Economics

Posts have been all-too-rare of late.  Work related to my fellowship with the American Council on Education, and holiday festivities, ate up the month of December.  Since most stories relating to the history of economic ideas aren't exactly time-sensitive, I figure this won't be terribly problematical for anyone out there. ;-)  After all, one of my graduate macro professors at the UofT, Angelo Melino, told me to hold off doing the history of economics until I was 65 or thereabouts.  He saw me drinking wine by a cosy fire, reflecting on the history of economic ideas in retirement.  As he put it, "they're all dead guys", so why rush to write up what they said?  Why ruin my career in economics by choosing this field that could wait some 40 years for whatever I had to say?

Was Angelo right?  Did I (and a few others I know) make a mistake by choosing to bury myself in this very small segment of the economics profession?  Angelo may have had a point (though it's not the one he meant to make) -- it may be that as one has more time to read and reflect, one writes better pieces in the history of economic ideas.  I've come more fully to understand the significance of (say) J. S. Mill or T. R. Malthus only after reading and rereading them, along with a great deal of contextual material.  Whether that's as true of other fields in economics or not, is another question.

But secondly, I've come to see that the history of economic ideas is in fact much more woven into our day-to-day lives than I might have imagined, earlier on.  Tonight, I have in mind the idea of "experts" -- economic or otherwise -- and ordinary people.  Specifically, recent reports of major scientific fraud related to cloning research:

When Dr. Hwang Woo Suk's recent reports of advances in cloning research were declared to have been fabricated on Friday, his disgrace left scientists wondering how he had risen so fast, deceived so many and fallen so hard.

The NYTimes account is here. 

What does the Hwang or any other story about scientific fraud have to do with the history of economic ideas or economics more generally?  Economists in our past have had important things to say about the incentives faced by experts.  But since we no longer know economists who wrote in the past, most of us are at a loss to find texts or analyses in economics that address this issue.  Yet economists, who write about incentives and economic man (including scientists), should be at the forefront of examining the incentives faced by scientists and the outcomes we might expect from those incentives.  And there's a great deal of historical material that bears on the issue, related but not limited to eugenics and eugenic "evidence" that passed muster among social scientists.  One of the major thrusts of the Vanity of the Philosopher, is that the past provides a cautionary tale for all of us who consider ourselves to be "experts" of some sort.