Our Psychohistorians
Rortybomb points out posts by Ezra Klein and Ryan Avent about the stature that economists occupy in policy debates.
Here’s one piece of the story that I’d like to add in I-should-be-doing-something-else slapdash fashion: the New Deal, WWII, and the Marshall Plan sucked in curious, ambitious academics like Schelling, Galbraith, (Strangelove!) etc., and they accrued lots of responsibility, prestige, and data. They demonstrated disciplinary flexibility, and their work proved applicable to international conflict, so once the Cold War set in, they were the go-to civilians for the national security state.
So if I’m right (and I’m certainly out of my depth here), it’s an accident of history that elevated economists to their status as cross-disciplinary policy experts. If similar conditions to WWII or the Cold War were to emerge tomorrow, we might instead cultivate a cadre of evo-psych experts or cognitive scientists and install them at the center of all our policy questions.
This topic leads to some pretty fun and important questions. Is there one intellectual/professional/academic discipline that is especially suited to synoptic, integrated thinking, or is that just built in to intelligence? Would we be any better off with, say, lawyers running everything? Was Paul Krugman right that becoming an economist was the closest thing to being a psychohistorian? Should a young Asimov reader choose a different line of work?
The one infalliable piece of career advice I ever got was to sell high. Economics in the sense of what is practiced by most current tentured professors is past its sell-by date.
— Jim Manzi · Jun 3, 07:28 PM · #
You are owed thanks, Rortybomb, Ryan and Ezra, for prompting the short but sweet return of Matt Frost to the Scene.
— Conor Friedersdorf · Jun 3, 08:35 PM · #
Yes! Great point about the start of the inter-connectedness. Matt post more!
Two additional things about econ and WWII:
1) A lot of experts expected after WWII for the United States to go immediately back into the Great Depression. We didn’t. In fact the 1950s-1970s were a pretty good macro run, and the Keynesians, for better or worse (or correctly or not correctly), had planted their flag on this Depression not returning. That’s a lot of prestige.
2) A lot of the post-WWII methods used for economic modeling are centered around linear programming, methods which got a lot of horsepower during WWII, because they were implemented to solve the “how to move supplies and bomb enemy’s supplies” equations. I think that’s kind of neat.
I can’t imagine what the evo-psych being the normalizing terms for our discussion would look like. Though 1890s evo-psych has a long US history with free-market arguments.
— Rortybomb · Jun 3, 08:42 PM · #
Krugman’s politics columns since 2000 “the credit crunch is all Reagan’s fault!” have had quite the whiff of men in white coats. He definitely puts the psycho in psychohistorian.
More seriously, Manzi’s right again. Paul Ormerod’s book Butterfly Economics is well worth reading on this particularly his point about how Hayek, not Friedman, is likely to be seen as the pre-eminent economist of the 20th century.
— Ali Choudhury · Jun 3, 10:26 PM · #
Why is it about practiced discipline. Charisma and the personalities have quite a bit to do with selling a theory. Greg Mankiw may be able to clown Krugman, but Krugman is the guy willing to go on Sunday morning TV and write for every op-ed available instead of teach abstractions and return home at a reasonable hour.
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