Economic Culture Wars
Economics writer Bob Kuttner devotes an
essay
in the American Prospect, a journal he edits, to an attack on my writings
in Slate and elsewhere. Don't worry, I won't respond here to that attack. If
you're interested, you can read my response in the November-December issue of
Kuttner's journal. What I would like to discuss is what I think is the true
reason people like myself and Kuttner--who also writes columns for Business
Week and the Boston Globe --have so much trouble getting along. We
are both, after all, liberals. I have even written for the American
Prospect . It is not, I claim, really a political issue in the normal sense.
What we are really fighting about is a matter of epistemology, of how one
perceives and understands the world.
If you
try to follow arguments about economics among intellectuals whose politics are
more or less left-of-center, you gradually become aware that the participants
in these arguments are divided not only by particular issues--deficit
reduction, NAFTA, and so on--but by the whole way that they think about the
economy. On one side there are those whose views are informed by academic
economics, the kind of stuff that is taught in textbooks. On the other there
are people like Kuttner, Jeff Faux of the Economic Policy Institute, and Labor Secretary Robert Reich. Some
members of this faction have held university appointments. But most of them
lack academic credentials and, more important, they are basically hostile to
the kind of economics on which such credentials are based.
If the anti-academic faction does not draw its ideas from
textbook economics, however, where does its worldview come from? Well, here's a
story that may sound trivial but which I regard as revealing. Back in 1992, I
supplied the American Prospect with an article on the problem of growing
income inequality. In the published piece, the editor, Kuttner, improved on
my drab title, but also added a dreadful subtitle: "The Rich, the Right, and
the Facts: Deconstructing the Income Distribution Controversy."
Deconstructing ? Why on earth would anyone not a member of the Modern
Language Association want to use an academic buzzword that has been the butt of
so many jokes? (What do you get when you cross a Mafioso and a
deconstructionist? Someone who makes you an offer you can't understand.) How
could the cause of liberal revival be served by making me sound like a
character out of a David Lodge satire?
Astrong desire to make economics less like a
science and more like literary criticism is a surprisingly common attribute of
anti-academic writers on the subject. For example, in a recent collection of
essays ( Foundations of Research in Economics: How do Economists do
Economics? , edited by Steven G. Medema and Warren Samuels),
James K.
Galbraith, a constant critic of the profession (and a frequent contributor to
the American Prospect ), urges economists to emulate "vibrant humanities
faculties" in which "departments develop viciously opinionated, inbred,
sometimes bitter and tyrannical but definitely exciting intellectual climates."
Economics, in short, would be a better field if the MIT economics department
were more like the Yale English department during its deconstructionist
heyday.
Academic
economics, the stuff that is in the textbooks, is largely based on mathematical
reasoning. I hope you think that I am an acceptable writer, but when it comes
to economics I speak English as a second language: I think in equations and
diagrams, then translate. The opponents of mainstream economics dislike people
like me not so much for our conclusions as for our style: They want economics
to be what it once was, a field that was comfortable for the basically literary
intellectual.
This should sound familiar. More than 40 years ago, the
scientist-turned-novelist C.P. Snow wrote his famous essay about the war
between the "two cultures," between the essentially literary sensibility that
we expect of a card-carrying intellectual and the scientific/mathematical
outlook that is arguably the true glory of our civilization. That war goes on;
and economics is on the front line. Or to be more precise, it is territory that
the literati definitively lost to the nerds only about 30 years ago--and they
want it back.
That is
what explains the lit-crit style so oddly favored by the leftist critics of
mainstream economics. Kuttner and Galbraith know that the quantitative,
algebraic reasoning that lies behind modern economics is very difficult to
challenge on its own ground. To oppose it they must invoke alternative
standards of intellectual authority and legitimacy. In effect, they are saying,
"You have Paul Samuelson on your team? Well, we've got Jacques Derrida on
ours."
A similar situation exists in other fields.
Consider, for example, evolutionary biology. Like most American intellectuals,
I first learned about this subject from the writings of Stephen Jay Gould. But
I eventually came to realize that working biologists regard Gould much the same
way that economists regard Robert Reich: talented writer, too bad he never gets
anything right. Serious evolutionary theorists such as John Maynard Smith or
William Hamilton, like serious economists, think largely in terms of
mathematical models. Indeed, the introduction to Maynard Smith's classic tract
Evolutionary Genetics flatly declares, "If you can't stand algebra, stay
away from evolutionary biology." There is a core set of crucial ideas in his
subject that, because they involve the interaction of several different
factors, can only be clearly understood by someone willing to sit still for a
bit of math. (Try to give a purely verbal description of the reactions among
three mutually catalytic chemicals.)
But many intellectuals who
can't stand algebra are not willing to stay away from the subject. They are
thus deeply attracted to a graceful writer like Gould, who frequently
misrepresents the field (perhaps because he does not fully understand its
essentially mathematical logic), but who wraps his misrepresentations in so
many layers of impressive, if irrelevant, historical and literary erudition
that they seem profound.
Unfortunately, Maynard Smith
is right, both about evolution and about economics. There are important ideas
in both fields that can be expressed in plain English, and there are plenty of
fools doing fancy mathematical models. But there are also important ideas that
are crystal clear if you can stand algebra, and very difficult to grasp if you
can't. International trade in particular happens to be a subject in which a
page or two of algebra and diagrams is worth 10 volumes of mere words. That is
why it is the particular subfield of economics in which the views of those who
understand the subject and those who do not diverge most sharply.
Alas, there is probably no
way to resolve this conflict peacefully. It is possible for a very skillful
writer to convey in plain English a sense of what serious economics is about,
to hide the algebraic skeleton behind a more appealing facade. But that won't
appease the critics; they don't want economics with a literary facade, they
want economics with a literary core. And so people like me and people like
Kuttner will never be able to make peace, because we are engaged in a zero-sum
conflict--not over policy, but over intellectual boundaries.
The literati truly cannot be
satisfied unless they get economics back from the nerds. But they can't have
it, because we nerds have the better claim.
