Speaking of Economics (Routledge, 2007) by Arjo Klamer makes sense of economists and their world in a persuasive and entertaining style.
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| | Print date: Monday, 6 September 2010
www.speakingofeconomics.com | copyright © 2007—2010 susan b. macdonald | statcounter
"So tell us, what makes a conversation scientific?" Hard-nosed scientists are tough and persistent. "How do we determine whether a theory is true or not?" They seem to be asking for some clear-cut, unequivocal standards that distinguish science from non-science, truthful claims from false ones. Oh, that we had such standards! — they would determine whether this book is truer and more scientific than any other you have read! Show the truth and the discussion is closed.
Let's talk about the practice of economics, and the study of economics. Do students ever get a three by five card that lists such standards? Of course not. They learn all kinds of procedures, many of which are implicit. They set up models and solve them, do the math, run regressions, do experiments; in short, they learn science by doing it. The initiation is intense and time consuming; the problems are tough, the mathematics daunting. Students forge ahead, follow the instructions of teachers and later, when reaching for that PhD, they try almost desperately to get the model and econometrics "right" so that the committee will approve. Later yet, in the business of publishing, they will do anything to get the referees to agree. That is the path of getting in the conversation. If asked about the truth, students think, "Honestly, do I have the luxury to care?" The rules and the norms of science? "Sure, those are the ones the referees agree on." Economics is a discipline.
The discipline shows in the continuous and inescapable appraisal. Practitioners continually evaluate models, tests, assumptions, methods, arguments and even each other. They say things like, "I like that paper very much" or "I do not care much for the work of F____." Appreciation becomes concrete when practitioners bother to talk about a paper, work with it, and assign it to their students. The quality of their attention is what matters. And, as pointed out in the previous chapter, most contributions get no attention at all. Are the decisions of journal editors — who reject the majority of submissions and publish only a handful — based on truth content? Get real, as they say. Selection is part of the game. Bounce around an idea for a model and you will quickly find out whether it finds approval or not. The point: Rather than applying standards, practitioners evaluate contributions to their conversation by an assortment of criteria. And usually they cannot tell you what they are.
The hard part of getting into a conversation is knowing how to evaluate contributions, your own as well as those of others. It is similar to grading students' papers — a seasoned professor more or less knows what grade to give; explaining why is the tough part. "The argument does not go very deep," one economist may say to another (or professor may say to student). "What do you mean?" "The model does not do a great deal." "?!" "Read my article and you may see what I mean." The evaluation is diffuse, often inarticulate, and seemingly arbitrary. You learn it by doing it.
Be prepared, though, to legitimate your daily practice. When cornered by a dogged student or challenged by an insistent politician eager to unmask you as a pseudo-scientist, you will have to fall back on the arguments that you have picked up along the way. Then you may want to say that economics comes as close to a physical science as any other, that unrealism of assumptions does not matter as long as theories predict, and that the lack of predictive accuracy is a matter of time. It helps to look a little scientific — distant, haughty, hard-nosed — when saying these things even though this does not do justice to your practice.