Asymmetrical Information

This is why I love Jane Galt. She takes one of my deep seated beliefs and writes about it with such beautiful clarity. Thank you.

Once upon a time there was a line in the sand separating so-called hard sciences and easy sciences. While I can't argue that the curriculum of many liberal arts programs are worth the time and effort spent on them, I can say that it's entirely way too simplistic make the distinction that you've made here.

That being said your point about the value of scientific thinking is well taken, particularly from a macro-economic standpoint. Over the next century, America's population will double. Will it also take that long to see a doubling of GDP? If not, where will gains in productivity come from? It'll come from advances in science and technology.

I think part of the reason we aren't still in a tech boom is that there simply weren't enough appropriately skilled workers to fuel the technological demands. As a result, three years later, many are still scratching their heads about what might be next.

I have a liberal arts background. Nonetheless, my personal opinion is for anyone considering a liberal arts degree is to do it on their own time. It's simply career suicide these days not to be scientifically educated.

I think it was George Will who said that modern economies are based on technological application of scientific discovery. (He may not have coined it, but it's something that falls out of his mouth when you push the right button. He (and others) will cite Eli Whitney, etc., etc. and rightly so.)

Before anyone begins to think of scientists as coldly rational, it's certainly true, but not necessarily about their politics. Last month, I spent a good deal of time in my lab trying to unconvince two Ph.D. chemists (both immigrants, one Chinese, one Indian) that the very same scheme Jane mentioned isn't in play. They're good at chemistry, but that doesn't mean their politics are free from nationalism and/or paranoia (justifiable or not.)

>>In other cases, such as sociology and political science, it's possible that you could, but don't yet

Might I suggest that this is a wholly inaccurate characterisation of sociology?

"In other cases, such as sociology and political science, it's possible that you could, but don't yet."

Certainly there are segments within sociology and political science that don't pursue social science as a science. But to suggest that those within these fields "don't yet" do their research as science is false. Most political scientists these days follow pretty much the pattern of research that Jane attributes to economists in the post. To be sure there are many who attack this trend within political science but it is rather overwhelming at this point. The major political science journals and most minor ones have adopted guidelines requiring authors to make data and methods available for replication purposes. Mathematical models have become standard fare. And statistical skills are commonplace. Now whether anyone is all that interested in the product of much of this research is another story altogether.

All in all, the central point of the post is dead on. That said, how does one convince people that constructing logically falsifiable arguments and gradually refining them offers a useful method for figuring out how the world works?

Matt Johnson: "I think part of the reason we aren't still in a tech boom is that there simply weren't enough appropriately skilled workers to fuel the technological demands."

Please.

Please forgive the minor quibble, Jane, but the scientific mindset involves two components, of which falsifiability is one. The other is the insistence on impersonal reproducible prediction -- "If, given these conditions, an unidentified experimenter does X, then Y will infallibly occur" -- which supports falsifiability from the empirical side. When you said that " We know commodity boycotts don't work, because they've been tried in various times and places," and later spoke of experimental design, you were pointing at that condition.

An example might be appropriate. If you were to chop a golf fairway up into individually identified small segments, and ask a huge group of watchers to predict on which of those labeled segments Jack Nicklaus's next drive would land, one of them might well predict it correctly. But could he do so a second time? A third? Okay, let's assume he could. That would satisfy a personal falsifiability criterion. But would he have a causal model for his predictions that others could use to make their own reliable predictions?

Sorcery shades over into science via impersonal reproducibility. A sorcerer, if one existed, might be able to do amazing things reproducibly, but he might not be able to teach anyone else how to do them. If he could teach anyone to replicate his feats -- that is, if they were based on a causal model rather than on his personal qualities -- that would put a sheen of scientific understanding on his knowledge, even if what he knew were only how to secure the assistance of superhuman creatures (e.g., angels, demons) to carry out his wishes.

(Coda: Of course, predictions have to carry deadlines. "It will happen if you wait long enough" won't satisfy most observers. Economics has limited power of prediction, because it has difficulty coping with the time dimension. But it's more rigorous than the other soft disciplines even so, by virtue of the greater mensurability of its phenomena and its capacity for making some predictions, albeit with fuzzy deadlines.)

I'm going to beg to differ on both poli sci and sociology. Sociology will assume the science mantle when it stops relying on first person subjective evaluations and surveys, political science when it develops a coherent micro model from which the macro can be derived -- as a friend I spoke to last night said, "In economics you don't have to sit around arguing whether people look to their own self interest, but you have to argue that in political science before you can get anywhere". Economics is the least scientific where it has the most trouble finding testable data, which is to say macroeconomic policy, which is why there's so much truth-shading by politics-minded economists in areas like tax policy; assertions are often arguable, but rarely falsifiable.

Good post!

I saw this article in Policy Review the other day which addresses a simliar point about measuring the effectiveness of government programs.

Jim

I've got about half a MS in postgraduate mathematics, and I can't make heads or tails of the calculus I've seen economists use.

So, it's possible that economics can be thought of as a "pure" science in some respects, namely that it fails to connect with reality in large areas.

OTOH economic calculus is supposed to describe real-world mechanisms, which in a way falsifies the above sentence. Not totally, because the number of measurable states is fairly low.

Just something pulled out of my rear to instigate mass ridicule. Enjoy. Now, for that second cup of joe...

political science when it develops a coherent micro model from which the macro can be derived -- as a friend I spoke to last night said, "In economics you don't have to sit around arguing whether people look to their own self interest, but you have to argue that in political science before you can get anywhere".

So, your argument is that all economists have the same view of human nature and all agree on the basic premises of macro- and micro- economics?!

While what you say is true of political philosophy/theory, it doesn't apply to much of the rest of the discipline. If all you mean by "economics" is econometric analysis then, yes, it is more scientific than most of political science simply because you can isolate far fewer variables. Further, by the standards of, say, quantum physics, economics is hardly a science, as its predictive value is minimal. The reason isn't so much failure of methodology but, again, because economics is a hell of a lot more complicated than physics--way more variables. I'd argue that political science is more complicated than economics for the same reason. Indeed, economics is, in a sense, a subset of political science since economic variables have to be taken into account in a good deal of political analysis.

I literally consider anyone with a Liberal Arts doctorate degree an idiot until proven otherwise. Likewise, those with advanced degrees in the hard sciences who (ie. Noam Chomsky) speak about matters outside their area of earned expertise. Am I therefore some sort of red neck buffoon that Richard Hofstadter discussed in his famous work some forty years ago, Anti-Intellectualism in America? Nope, this is merely the very rational--and prudent manner of dealing with these individuals. Regrettably, there is often more than a little truth to the old saying that the Ph.D. means “piled, higher, and deeper.”

The Ph.D. is largely the degree of the intellectual slut. One usually must be a whore who has little self respect and integrity. Do I offend anybody? Tough, that’s just the cold reality of the matter.

Political science has an additional huge problem.

In attempting to make itself a science, it followed the physics model, wherein one of the most valued attributes to theorizing is "parsimony." By which we mean that you should seek the least complicated explanations for an activity (think of it as related to Occam's Razor).

The problem, however, is that whereas in physics you are attempting to explain the behavior of inanimate objects, in political science, you are trying to describe behavior that occurs in the equivalent of a black box (i.e., leaders' heads).

So, you wind up w/ theories that purport to explain international behavior based on single strands, e.g., neorealism---where states respond to "Who has the most power?" or "Who is the biggest threat, defined in specific terms of military, economic, or political power?"

The problem is that:

1. Few decision-makers respond solely to a single stimuli.
2. Few decision-makers have only one reason for an action.
3. Replicability and falsifiability become the judgement of the author, not an outside observer (see previous comment about personal falsifiability).

Worse, you wind up ignoring non-quantifiable, non-replicable factors. For the longest time, international relations theorizing (in the neorealist mode) ignored the role of history, since you can't really measure it, and more importantly, because its role (such as establishing precedent or "reputation") was just murky. For the same reason, cultural explanations have struggled for acceptance.

As for the mathematical models and the like trumpeted previously, "garbage in, garbage out". Some MIT prof, years ago, came up w/ a giant equation to express the Peloponnesian War (iirc). And the purpose of this would be?

Being able to reduce behavior to a 2X2 matrix labeled the "Prisoner's Dilemma" is useful if you're trying to create a REALLY basic explanation. But using that to teach why arms control is good and how we should behave viz. North Korea or Iraq is plain silly.

Let me clarify again: I don't think that economics is a science in the same way that physics is. Some of its models have predictive validity; others don't yet. But I'm unaware of any political science models with even partial predictive validity.

There are things that economists argue about, but there are a lot of things they don't. You wouldn't find anyone having serious arguments about, say, the laws of supply and demand, that people attempt to maximize their value as they perceive it, that as interest rates rise the value of bonds falls, or any of a thousand other premises that economists can, when talking to each other, assume are basic premises from which they can attempt to build larger models. I'd venture to say all economists would agree, for example, that all else equal a cut in marginal tax rates is preferable to an increase in tax deductions. I've yet to see similar sorts of agreements among political scientists.

"The humanities simply doesn't have this rigor. In some cases, such as literature, you really can't...."

As you point out, part of the problem here is that testing human behavior has its limits. One is our ethical concerns about human experimentation. Another is the dependence of people to report about themselves. Another is the difficulty of conducting an experiment such that the conditions of the experiment don't alter the behavior. (I'm summarizing these points from your post, but I agree with them all.)

I would add that the humanities also have a different kind of rigor, or at least should have. Modern science is a problem-solving activity. You define your terms and what will count as a solution in advance. The trick then is to determine the model that will appropriately fit these agreed upon elements. The humanities, on the other hand, do not begin from definitions, they work their way towards them. Socrates asking "what is justice?" is a perfect example. A true political science must begin with justice already defined, at least in broad outline; for the classical study of politics, however, the Socratic question is what is most important.

To ask the Socratic question requires you to be attentive to the world, but also to be attentive to what response you have to the world. Nothing is settled in advance, and you end up paying a lot of attention to your own ordinary ways of seeing the world. This is true all along the way; at no point should the inquiry become a fully technical enterprise with its own technical terms and methods.

Is there a rigor that is possible here? I believe so, but it is much more difficult than the rigor of modern science. It requires a painstaking attempt to adequately articulate our ways of thinking that are not entirely on the surface or entirely coherent. We are assisted greatly in this endeavor by dialogue, even though we discover that there are difficult divisions between us and others. If we are confident that even these divisions can be explained, however, we realize that we simply have added another layer to the task: we must come to an understanding of ourselves in the context of our shared world.

This is not abstract navel gazing, although it can devolve into that. It is the very difficult demand to determine what we mean and what we want. Anyone who thinks this line of questioning is unnecessary has simply decided on their own terms as the best, which is a conclusion usually comical for its short-sightedness.

I don't think our humanities programs are really this demanding, and so I agree with the substance of your critique. I also lament the lack of appreciation that humanities students have for the sciences, and economics in particular, since it bears so directly on many of their thoughts about society. At the same time, I don't believe that modern science, including social science, is inherently more rigorous. I believe that it appears more rigorous because its rigor is more easily made manifest, which keeps everyone honest. The humanities suffer fools too gladly, and so demean their own important work.

One can absolutely ascertain that 2+2=4. Regretfully, this is not so when dealing with human nature which is intrinsically nebulous. Thus, political scientists and economists are practitioners of the Liberal Arts. I strongly contend, for instance, that it is foolish to ignore the harsh reality of the at least metaphorically reality of Original Sin. Yet, how does one empirically test out this premise?

I replied to one of Jane's points over at James' blog, but a few other things about this "political science isn't a science" thing bother me:

1. Yes, there is a giant pissing match in our discipline between the empiricists and the non-empiricists. Coupled with that is an internal war among the empiricists between the quals and the quants and the game theorists. But then again political science has really only existed as a separate discipline from history, sociology, psychology, and economics for about 50 years (despite the 100-year pedigree of the APSA), and it's still trying to figure out what to do with those disparate heritages.

2. Not everybody plays with 2x2 contingency tables and single-variable explanations of political phenomena. We have this neat concept called "multiple regression" that can deal with more than one independent variable these days; we use that sometimes.

3. Explanation is more important than prediction in the long run. I'd rather have a wrong prediction than a wrong explanation. If we just wanted predictions, we'd do what insurance companies do: stick a bazillion independent variables in the model and stepwise-regress it. It'll predict great to your original dataset but (a) will blow up if you apply it to anything else and (b) won't make any sense anyway ("hey, it turns out people with purple cars and limps have more accidents than others"; yeah, so?). By contrast, I can tell you why almost 400 members of Congress voted for articles of impeachment and procedural motions leading up to it, and I did it with 9 independent variables - and some of the explanations would be quite surprising even to those who followed the public debate and talking heads.

4. There is no number 4.

5. I can build you a very simple probit model today that will predict how most voters will behave in the next congressional election, based on nothing other than their demographics. Heck, I already have; read this paper. It ain't Galileo dropping stuff off the Tower of Pisa (apocryphal), but it's pretty good for a then-2nd year grad student playing with a Heckman selection model (ok, not so simple) and 50-year-old theories of voter behavior.

Now, granted, there are a lot of snake-oil salesmen running around pretending to have all the answers. Some of them (Larry Sabato *cough*) are in my discipline. Some of them (John Lott, Paul Krugman) are in more "respectable" ones. But just because some Ivy grad whose only exposure to The American Voter was that it happened to be on a bookshelf in someone's office in his department can't tell you who'll win a local school board election doesn't mean that nobody can.

(Sorry, y'all struck my "I've got to defend the legacy of Warren Miller" nerve.)

Telling me what various demographic groups will probably do is good, but not that good, because first of all those demographics change, and second of all, it still won't let you predict an election two years out. The order of magnitude of event required to predict an election (if the president gets caught stealing hte White House silver, having sex with all his interns, selling intelligence secrets to China, ordering hits on prominent members of hte other party, and there's a big ass recession, the other party will win. Otherwise -- I'll tell you in November) is too large to be useful. I on the other hand can predict the outcomes of comparitively trivial changes in wage rages, interest rates, or other prices. Which is not, again, to say that Economics is a science in the way that Physics is. I'd simply argue that economics is further down the road to sciencehood than political science, and that pretty much all of its practicioners agree that the scientific method is the standard to which they should aspire, which is not currently true in poli-sci.

And on the philosophical front:

>>Let me clarify again: I don't think that economics is a science in the same way that physics is. Some of its models have predictive validity; others don't yet. But I'm unaware of any political science models with even partial predictive validity.

"Predictive validity" is a vastly more restrictive standard than "making falsifiable statements" and I don't know of any serious philosopher of science who would use a "predictive validity" standard. I don't think that Stephen Hawking's made a prediction in his life -- or if he has, the making of predictions has been a very small part of his work indeed.

On the "unarguable positions of economists", I think the list fares pretty badly in comparison with sociologists and political scientists (not that I understand how "political science" differs from sociology if indeed it does:

1. You wouldn't find anyone having serious arguments about, say, the laws of supply and demand

Of course you will. The existence of supply and demand curves is a very hot topic indeed; it runs out that for the smooth, monotonic supply and demand schedules that the theory needs, you need very tight and unrealistic mathematical assumptions. The proof of the pudding is that very few existing companies ever try to estimate demand schedules for their products. And, of course, they Marshallian supply-demand analysis is something that only works in principle in partial equilibrium.

What are the "laws of supply and demand" anyway? I've got two economics degrees and I've never seen them written down in the Newtonian formulations that seem to be implied here.

2), that people attempt to maximize their value as they perceive it,

Notoriously either a tautology or an incredibly arguable proposition. This is a useful modelling strategy for particular cases of interest to economists, nothing more, and anyone who is trying to defend it as a proposition about the world has started doing philosophy, not economics.

3. that as interest rates rise the value of bonds falls

This is simply a mathematical tautology. The political science equivalent would be that as one party's share of the vote rises, the other party's share falls.

4.., or any of a thousand other premises that economists can, when talking to each other, assume are basic premises from which they can attempt to build larger models. I'd venture to say all economists would agree, for example, that all else equal a cut in marginal tax rates is preferable to an increase in tax deductions.

I'd bet a very large sum of money that there are economists out there to back all manner of deductions schedules. Industrial policy is not dead yet by any means.

It is one of the things that is very wrong with economics as it is practiced in the Anglosphere that economists have so little knowledge of, and take so little interest in, the work of sociologists. Philip Mirowski has written a number of good books about this physics-envy.

No argument there, at least. Part of the problem (IMHO) is that undergrads don't get exposed to the empirical side of political science much (much of the curriculum is taught as political history), so they're ill-equipped to understand it when they get to grad school. So we spend a year teaching stuff that they'd have been taught as undergrads in econ or psychology or sociology.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that a sizable chunk of political science rejects (a) empiricism, however loosely defined, and (b) the label "political science." You don't have to crunch logit models to be an empiricist, but at the very least you need to be rigorous.

>>I on the other hand can predict the outcomes of comparitively trivial changes in wage rages, interest rates, or other prices.

That does not strike me as a terribly rigorous statement.

The best way to describe professional political science to an outsider is as an amalgam of the following:

Public choice economics (that gets the rat-choicers from the Chicago school and some of the empirical theorists)
Political psychology (that gets the Michigan "psycho-sociological" crowd; probably the bulk of American quantitative work today fits somewhere in here)
Political sociology (that gets the Columbia school, not that there's much of it left; they mostly went to psych. in the 60s)
(These three can be subsumed under "political behavior" and "public opinion".)

Political philosophy/(normative) theory.
Political history (that's, uh, historians; most of the undergrad curriculum comes from here, just to confuse people)
Journalism and communications
International relations (kinda a bizarro world off on its own, with the most in common with rat-choice; that's where your hard-core empirical theorists and game theory people hang out)
Econometrics (and related method-focused parts of other disciplines, like biostatistics etc.)

Plus a few things mostly developed in the discipline (most notably, political institutions, which may owe a lot to Weber, and IR).

Add all that up and it's no surprise that there's no uniform "political science"! To further confuse things, outside the U.S. (even in Canada), political science is much less quantitative (mainly because IR started as a fairly unique phenomenon driven by U.S. government grants during the Cold War) and thus probably is further from contemporary economics than it is in the U.S.

CP Snow was concerned, as I recall (it's been a long time since I read his book) that we were graduating students who knew *either* Shakespeare's plays, *or* the Second Law of Thermodynamics--and that these were two entirely separate groups of people with little or no overlap.

But, today, we've solved that problem. A high proportion of today's graduates know *neither* Shakespeare's plays *nor* the Second Law of Thermodynamics. What they do know is some postmodernist metatheory which convinces them that they have no need to learn anything substantive--either in the sciences or in the humanities.

I believe there may be some confusion here about what "economics" studies. A lot of people think that it studies money. That's not correct.

Economics is the study of collective decision making, which is why Arrow's work is properly considered a work of economics even though he proved that an ideal democratic system was impossible.

Likewise, Von Neumann's work on things like the Prisoner's Dilemma is properly considered economics.

In these kinds of areas, economics goes beyond science and embraces the crystal clarity of mathematics.

I agree with you Jane, and I'll take it a step further. Fields like economics and psychology are often attacked by scientists and nonscientists alike as being pseudosciences, not amendable to theorizing and testing hypothesis as someone else has stated. I, however, don't necessarilly take this as a flaw. It is simply the nature of the fields combined with our lack of insight into quantifying chaotic systems. But, at least these fields establish 'premises' which nearly everyone can agree on which can establish a chain of logic. The problem with political science is that (especially in our universities), this concept is twisted and corrupt. Indeed, hypothesis that have overwhelmingly been rejected by reality are taught as gospel in many universities (read Socialism). How can parties have rational, productive discourse when essentially no basic premisis are agreed on? I believe that that is why society has become so polarized. We continue to have to fight the same battles over and over again because we do not come to a consensus on any starting points. History is ignored, sneered at, or spun. Sadly, many of the most heralded 'intellectuals' (mainly in the far left in my opinion) seem to take the stance that their theories are definitive, while reality is frequently inacurrate. How does one engage that sort of thinking?

“I, however, don't necessarilly take this as a flaw. It is simply the nature of the fields combined with our lack of insight into quantifying chaotic systems.”

That’s right, there is no logical reason why a Liberal Arts practitioner should suffer from an inferiority complex just because they are engaged in intrinsically nebulous work. The so-called hard and soft sciences simply have different chores to perform.

>I don't think that Stephen Hawking's made a >prediction in his life -- or if he has, the making >of predictions has been a very small part of his >work indeed.

You're saying that Hawking Radiation was not a significant prediction?

D, those arguments are trivial. We may argue about the shape of the supply curve -- surely it's not a blinding insight that it's not a nice continuous curve like we drew in our notebooks -- but I'm unaware of any serious economist who would argue that, all else equal, people supply more stuff when the price goes up, and less when the price goes down; and that conversely, people generally demand more stuff when the price goes down, and less when the price goes up (I've yet to see an example of geffen goods, and luxury goods perform a signalling function that has intrinsic utility -- these are special cases that inform our understanding, but don't overthrow the basic concept, which is what you seem to be arguing).

Great thread. I particualrly enjoyed Jane's comments regarding the differing kinds of disputes pertaining to economics. Economists do their profession's reputation no favors when they yammer on like T.V. weathermen, minus the humility and sense of humor.

A number of comments:

1. Jon von Neumann did very little work on the Prisoner's Dilemma; Stephen is thinking of John Nash.

2. The statements that "a high proportion of today's graduates have only learned postmodern metatheories which convince them that they don't need to learn anything substantive" and that "a significant percentage of universities teach Socialism as if it were Gospel" are hilariously unrigorous.

3. I retract any and all statements about Stephen Hawking, and happily substitute David Deutsch.

And finally, Jane wrote:

>>but I'm unaware of any serious economist who would argue that, all else equal, people supply more stuff when the price goes up, and less when the price goes down; and that conversely, people generally demand more stuff when the price goes down

We've already established that neither of us are on the cutting edge of economic theory, but this just won't do if you're trying to defend economics as against sociology and political theory.

You might notice that you couldn't bring yourself to write that sentence without putting in the qualification "all else being equal", which immediately alters it from a statement about the world to a proposition of pure metaphysics which is no longer falsifiable.

Second, your characterisation of these "laws" is actually inconsistent; if people "tend to supply more" when the price goes up, but also "tend to demand less", then what happens to the excess production which isn't demanded?

[This is not a trivial point at all, by the way; it's at the heart of my earlier objection that these "universally accepted laws" are actually principles of Marshallian partial equilibrium analysis, a way of doing economics which is pretty much universally *rejected* in the profession for purposes of practical application. Prices and quantities are determined jointly between many separate markets across an economy by agents acting with imperfect information and in conditions of irreducible uncertainty.]

In any case, I can come up with numerous counterexamples; a diabetic's demand for insulin does not rise as the price of insulin falls, and the supply of paper is notoriously dependent on capacity decisions made three years ago rather than today's price. You might object that in these cases "all things are not equal"; but at this point you either accept that not all economists agree on how they're not equal, or retire from doing science.

Stephen den Beste is closest to being right, though I disagree with the attempt to unify economics under any particular theme of "collective decision making". The Soviet Academy made a useful distinction between:

1) "Economic cybernetics", which is a branch of mathematics (specifically, it is the branch of applied mathematics which deals with the constrained optimisation of certain kinds of complex system). This is where game theory, general equilibrium analysis, production functions, trade theory, etc go.

2) "Political economy", which is the study of how social arrangements of various kinds affect the control of the means of production and the distribution of consumption goods.

The first of these is not a science (unless somebody's going to claim that engineering is a science, in which case this is simply a disagreement about dictionaries). The second is a science if and only if sociology is a science, because sociologists study exactly the same phenomena using most of the same methodology.

>

Ask American Airlines.

Ooops. Above response was regarding what happens to excess production that isnt demanded. Answer is you get mothballed planes rotting on tarmacs in Texas.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/index.html

John Brockman's "Third Culture" ideas might fit with this discussion.

"Minimum wage labor is not generally thought to be a good example of a price-inelastic good over the medium-to-long term, but you can argue that small increases don't produce effects that are distinguishable from background noise, and we can look for evidence."

Would it be crass of me to bring up the Card study on minimum wage increases in PA here? Or to mention how Reich, when he was labor sec, got crucified in Congress when he cited it in his arguments for an increase in the minimum wage.

I'd argue that being a good scholar in the social sciences or humanities is vastly more difficult than being in the "hard" sciences or technology. If you don't think clearly in engineering, your bridge falls down, you have cost overruns, or your plant blows up; to make an allusion to Dr. Johnson, the rock refutes your foot.

But you can be imprisoned by outdated or sloppy theories in the humanities for decades or centuries.

"Which is not to diminish the importance of literature and art."

Um, really? Why not?

As far as I can see, you are arguing that a sound foundation in scientific thought is necessary for a person to get on in the world - exactly how not specified, but presumably by being a responsible voter (else why discuss rent control), and so that you are not exploited personally by others ("risk being led around by the nose"). Since literature and art do not need the scientific method, and it is in this way important - then doesn't that diminish the importance of literature and art?

I remember debating in college with the fruity majors (English, etc.), one thing that struck me was how amazingly ill informed they were about the basic facts of things they had very strong opinions on. Their arguments were weak, backed by paper thin reasoning and even less substantial facts. For example, in discussions about WWII and the use of nuclear weapons to end the war with Japan almost without fail the anti-nuke folks would not have even a basic understanding of the events of WWII other than that it happened. To some degree that wasn't unusual, because they were just "kids", just undergraduate college students. What has really astounded me though is that this situation does not change. No matter how old they get and no matter how much more education and experience they get in 'em they by and large do not gain more facts, more perspective, or more reasoning ability. There are a very few exceptions which are notable precisely because they are exceptions, otherwise the landscape is the same. It's rather amazing really.

>>Ooops. Above response was regarding what happens to excess production that isnt demanded. Answer is you get mothballed planes rotting on tarmacs in Texas.

Precisely! This excess supply was not brought about by any "price signals"; it was brought about because the decision to build airline capacity is taken years in advance of any knowledge of what the demand might be.

There is nothing intrinsically "leftist" about this critique of the "standard" supply-demand model, by the way; it is usually identified with the Austrian School.

The question of why so many liberally educated people have a hard time dealing with rigorous, fact-based argument is interesting indeed, though I strongly suspect that it has much more to do with the specific character of college and university degree programs than it does with the inherent nature of "humanistic" vs. "scientific" approaches to problems.

The fact is that in the U.S. these days "liberal arts" is a de facto synonym for "humanities" and for "easy," neither of which ought to be the case. The classical definition of a liberal education included not only the study of literature, the arts, speculative philosophy and rhetoric, but also mathematics and the natural sciences. Until recently it was assumed that an educated person would be at least somewhat familiar with the basic tools of quantitative and experimental thinking that shape the practice of the natural (and to a lesser extent the social)sciences. But in the last two or three decades, undergraduate programs in the liberal arts have de-emphasized course requirements in general, and in the sciences and math in particular.

Whose fault is this? Before you start pointing fingers at those mushy-headed English professors, ask yourself if perhaps the science faculties of our universities have been all too happy to be relieved of the burden of teaching non-specialized courses to undergraduates who have no intention of going on the advanced study in the sciences.

Not that they ever put much effort into it in the first place. Most colleges and universities offer special courses in the sciences for non-science majors. In theory, this is a good idea. In the case of say, U.S. History, a single course can probably serve the needs of freshmen intending to major in history, and sophmores and juniors majoring in the sciences who need to fulfill a requirement (or satisfy their desire to learn for learning's sake) in history. But in the case of Chemistry, its very difficult to construct a course that will serve the freshmen chemistry major and the junior history major equally well. But the sciences-for-non-science-majors courses at our universities tend to be just dreadful - long on the wrote memorization of facts that are only of use to a specialist, and short on real scientific thinking. At my alma mater, Biology majors taking the intro biology course for majors learned about how to form hypotheses, conduct controlled experiements, and interpret experiemental data. Non-biology majors taking the the intro biology course for non-majors memorized the latin names of human bone groups. No wonder non-science majors recoil from science. In many ways these courses are the exact opposite of what they need to be, and its not the English faculty that's designing them.

It also needn't be the case that a liberal arts education is synonymous with "easy." Let's face it: the kids majoring in mechanical engineering work harder (on average) than the kids majoring in English lit. But that has nothing to do with the inherent nature of the two subjects. One could easily design a tremendously challenging and rigorous undergraduate program in English lit., just as one could design an easy, watered down program in mechanical engineering. The academic cultures of the two discipline make this unlikely to happen, but there's nothing about the material itself, or, neccesarily, the students, that make this impossible.

Don't believe me? Consider this: every year, thousands of humanities majors graduate from college and go on to law school, where they absolutely work their posteriors off. And the study of law is a helluva lot more like the study of literature than it is the study of physics. On average, I suspect that law students work harder than engineering students (not an apples to apples comparison, I know, since the former are graduate level while the latter are undergraduate, but close enough). Certainly among my circle of friends nobody has worked harder in an academic setting than the folks who enrolled at good law schools. That's because law faculties DEMAND that their students master a vast body of factual information about the law AND master a rigorous, disciplined method of deploying that information in legal reasoning. English lit. faculties could do the same thing - demand that their students be exceptionally well read in the canon of English and non-English literature and that they be able to do complex analyses of literary works backed up by close critical readings of texts - they just don't. I knew English majors in college (I kid you not) who bragged that they had gotten by with completely finishing less than a half dozen novels in their four years of college. Chemistry majors with similar work ethics would be drummed out of the department.

Full disclosure: I myself double majored in Biology (with a heavy emphasis on molecular biology and genetics) and Religion (a little bit of theology, history, literary criticism, anthropology, and philosophy - a hodge-podge of humanities disciplines if there ever was one) in college, and am now finishing up an MBA (concentrating in finance). Of these three disciplines, the biology was the "hardest," the finance was the "most useful," and the religion was the most fulfilling.

sd - It's true the universities could have hard English, but that would mean fewer students would apply, cause who wants to work? They don't really need to be experts to do whatever it is English majors do anyway.

It's also true they could conceivably have easy engineering programs, but then they'd have a hard time selling their graduates to employers, what with their bridges falling down and all. And if you can't sell your grads, once again fewer will apply.

So if we assume the universities want to maximize enrollment, and hence $$$, the current system of "sciences hard, humanities easy" serves them pretty well, no?

Yes, D, that's still completely off point, and refuting a view of economics held by no one whose completed Micro 101. I cited the basic idea of supply and demand, on which all economists agree; that doesn't mean anyone thinks markets clear instantly, but it does mean that they have a general agreement about how they clear. General agreement on the rate at which objects fall in a vacuum does not preclude building a special case for objects in an atmosphere, or a pool of water, or other variables which change the initial "pure" case. but it's helpful to start with the vacuum so we all know to what we're applying our modifiers.

sd, there may be other reasons why liberal arts curricula tend to be less demanding that those in other fields aside from differing expectations of the faculty.

In fields like mechanical engineering or law there would be, I would think, a certain minimal level of knowledge that is necessary to impart in order to make the degrees at all meaningful. It may be very difficult to make an engineering program significantly easier without making it significantly longer while still maintaining a reasonable level of confidence that graduates would be able to function competently in the fields for which they are being trained. In the liberal arts, similar objective requirements may not exist. In the absence of these measures, any outside pressures to water down the curriculum would be more difficult to resist.

I agree that liberal arts programs don't have to be less rigorous than more scientifically-oriented ones, but I think there are reasons why they tend to be, beyond things like student/faculty laziness (my apologies if I'm mischaracterizing your comments).

They do have hard English courses; try to really master Shakespeare, Swift, or Chaucer to the point where you find them laugh-out-loud funny and you'll find you have to put in a lot of bone-crushingly boring work, reading enough of their work, and their contemporaries, to accumulate the vocabulary and cultural knowlege to make their work truly accessible. Once you're there, it's incredibly rich, but it's a hell of a lot of work, and the commenter's right -- if most humanities majors wanted to work hard, they'd be in a different major. It's also nearly impossible to communicate to someone who hasn't put in the work why they'll be glad they did once they've had that 'click' experience where Chaucer et. al. suddenly spring to life. I doubt math majors are all that much more motivated, but it's a lot harder to skate in a calculus class, because the culture doesn't like it, and because it's blindingly obvious when you're wrong.

Brian:

While people tend to like to work less rather than more, people also tend to be willing to work hard if there's value in it for them. In the case of undergraduate English programs, I would argue that making the track harder for students would make them more marketable at the end.

Consider an example I know a little bit about: corporate strategy consulting. The big strategy consulting firms (McKinsey, Bain, Boston Consulting Group) hire MBAs out of business school, but they also hire quite a few people directly out of undergrad for 2-4 year gigs (generally the understanding is that you'll go back to get an MBA after that time). Relatively few of the undergrads that get hired are "business" majors. Partly this is because the most prestigious universities tend not to offer undergraduate business programs, and partly because the general consensus is that you don't learn a lot about business in undergrad business programs anyway, so who cares what your undergrad major is.

So what kinds of majors do the big consulting firms hire? Well, the most common major is economics, which I suppose is to be expected. But firms also hire engineering majors and humanities majors. But of these two categories, they tend to hire a lot more engineering majors than humanities majors. Now why is this the case?

Well, its not because the engineers have learned specific skills in college that are immediately useful. Spending four years learning how to do process control on chemical fermentations has little more to do with how to run a business than spending four years studying English poetry. It may be more "practical" in the context of the chemicals industry, but its not more "practical" in the context of business strategy consulting. And its not really because the engineers have better quant skills either. True, business is all about numbers, but the level of quant sophistication in most business applications is quite low, barely above high school algebra.

Rather, consulting firms hire more engineers than humanities majors because consultants work very, very hard, and the firms trust that engineering majors will be able to work long hours without complaint. The humanities majors who do get hired by the strategy consulting firms tend to be from only the very "best" universities, the assumption being that they must have a good work ethic because even if they slacked off for four years in college they would have needed to work very hard to get in in the first place.

And its not just consulting. The fact is, engineering majors can pursue lots of different business opportunities coming out of college because surviving an undergard engineering program shows that you're reasonably bright and very hard-working. If an English degree signified the same thing, then English majors would enjoy higher salaries coming out of college. And that's something students will work harder for.

I don't know, Janester. I laugh at Chaucer - especially the fart jokes - and understand him simply through reading in my spare time. OBEV at bedtime and so on. (Quiller-Couch edition, natch.)

Anyway, no one's saying English CAN'T be hard, simply that it usually isn't. It may be different for those intending to go into the academy, but lots of English undergrads can and do coast.

I majored in Econ if that matters to anyone.

I think it would be difficult to argue that humanities studies are anywhere near as rigorous as engineering and hard sciences generally. I have no problem with this, per say. A wimpy English program produces a generation of bad poets while a wimpy engineering program produces collapsing bridges. But when it comes to the domain of ideas, be it economics or political science, we still have a strange tribute of respect for the opinions of the 'inteligencia' who tend not to respect the scientific principles of logic and evidence that are pounded into scientists and lawyers. This mindset of people appeal more to the beauty of theory than respect empirical evidence. I've always found that conservative thinkers are more likely to link theory to evidence (ie Kaynes theories compared to the Regan boom) while liberal thinkers rely soly on the beauty of the theory (yes but Chomsky says..). To those of scientific bent, this is alarming. It is analogous to arguing that Copernicus' model of the solar system is correct because it is more symetrically beautiful than Kepler's observations. This is arrogant because it assumes the evidence is wrong without supposing that they may simply be missing more fundamental hidden symmetries. This in turn leads to very bad policy.

It's not exactly crass; in fact, it's what I was talkign about. The result of the Card study, even if it's true (a much disputed topic) is to refine our knowlege of the elasticity of demand for minimum wage labor; if its results are not a statistical artifact or a result of poor survey design, as many have argued, what they tell us is that small changes don't produce a measurable effect in the fairly short (months, as I recall) time frame they studied. This cannot be generalized, as many, including I believe Robert Reich, did, to proclaim that if we ratchet up the minimum wage a couple of bucks no one will lose their jobs. This is exactly why I think people need training in scientific and statistical methodology -- otherwise, you can't understand the limits of what those in authority tell you.

hi all,
i have been following the conversation. i found this an interesting claim:

"In these kinds of areas, economics goes beyond science and embraces the crystal clarity of mathematics."

yes steve, it can, but the question i ask would be for what purpose? it can really work in many areas, but consider different possibilities. i am thinking of models of aggregating individual microeconomic agent preference structures into a coherent macro model to derive an aggregate demand function. when i was wading through this stuff, the state of the art was to assume that all agents had cobb-douglas preference functions, and then aggregate. i don't know about you, but i don't work according to a c-d-p-f. it also required a giant set of "simplifying" assumptions to make it all tractable and completely unrealistic. great. i have a model that is elegant, abstract, and divorced from the real world. i have "clarity" and not much else to show for it. admittedly that was approx. 15 years ago, and much may have changed in that regard. i think it unlikely given the love that economists have for mathematical models that are tractable--a consequence of the "ceteris parabis" condition that holds the world at bay (but please correct me on this). one ray of hope in all this, especially in trying to model economic behaviour is looking at experimental work and seeing what we actually get.

what about those rock solid supply and demand curves/preferences? i would like to add my querilous voice the wonderful theoretical possibility of the giffen good, kinked demand curves, regret, transitivity violations, the optimization vs. limited rationality debate, etc. and why do we buy into the assumption that human beings have monolithic preference functions, based on an idea of a unified psyche?

dsquared pointed to an interesting author-mirowski--whose central thesis is that economics is consciously modelled, analogously, to classical physics and shares its limitations brought on by a too close adherence to it (at least the stuff we did when we were undergraduates). i'll also point to another: jack amariglio, an economics academic interested in post modern thought.

gotta go to a dental appointment. i'll catch up with the rest of it later...

"I've always found that conservative thinkers are more likely to link theory to evidence ... while liberal thinkers rely soly on the beauty of the theory ..."

This is our old friend the correspondence/coherence dichotomy. Do we judge a theory because it's logically coherent with itself, or because it corresponds to the evidence? It'd be nice to have both, but if we can't have both, which should we pick?

Marxism, for instance, is neatly coherent. All wars are capitalists fighting each other for natural rescources or whatever. No correspondence at all though.

Classical liberalism doesn't quite cohere. Attempts have been made for the one big theory that explains it all - natural rights, se;f ownership, Bentham's "greatest happiness" principle - but a lot of the time we play it by ear in the great common law tradition.

I'd rather correspond than cohere any day.

(And speaking of bad poets.)

sd:

"If an English degree signified [a good work ethic], then English majors would enjoy higher salaries coming out of college. And that's something students will work harder for."

Maybe. Suppose we look at universities like a business, sort of a scholastic factory, with their graduates as their product. Students want to be turned into a desirable product, but desirable is determined by the "buyer". Who is buying all these English majors and what do they want out of them? A work ethic? Prestige? Taste in literature? I don't know.

But whatever they want is likely what they will get.

Hi D!

"In any case, I can come up with numerous counterexamples; a diabetic's demand for insulin does not rise as the price of insulin falls"

Interesting discussion going on here - just one quibble:

Erm, usually the Insulin case is splashed out in Micro 101 litterature under the heading "inelastic demand'...

Regards / GulGnu

-Stabil som fan!

One difference I've noticed between hard science programs and humanities programs in general is that in order to achieve the common goal of more funding for each department, the criteria seem fundamentally different. Engineering, chemistry, and physics schools place tremendous emphasis on putting hard-working intelligent majors into industry and grad school. Reputation is everything, they grow by attracting good students to a good program. Communications and english departments get more money by making their departments a revolving door, "we graduated x% more people than last year, we need more money!" So there is no incentive for humanities departments to have rigorous programs, in fact, there is disincentive. Except for the very few at the very top that do value reputation. Disclosure: MS in physics, wife is MS in chemistry, mother-in-law is chair of a communications department. Hearing her talk about her department really brings this difference home. My wife helped her grade some essays and could not believe these college students were writing at an 8th grade level. But push them through, and more money will be forthcoming.

"An Indian-born econmist once explained his personal theory of reincarnation to his graduate economics class. 'If you are a good economist, a virtuous economist,' he said, 'you are reborn as a physicist. But if you are an evil, wicked economist, you are reborn as a sociologist.'

A sociologist might say that this quote shows what is wrong with economists: they want a subject that is fundamentally about human beings to have the mathematical certainty of the hard sciences. And without doubt there is too much mathematics in the economics journals, because mathematical elaboration is a time-honored way of dressing up a banal idea.

But good economists know that the speaker was talking about something else entirely: the sheer difficulty of the subject. Economics is harder than physics; luckily it is not quite as hard as sociology."

- Paul Krugman, Peddling Prosperity

"A wimpy English program produces a generation of bad poets while a wimpy engineering program produces collapsing bridges."

You push your argument a little bit too far. A wimpy English program may also produce a generation of idiots unable to think and follow a logical argument. This leaves them unable to adequately respond to the seductive siren call of the ideological monsters ready to take advantage of them. Evil ideas turned into action can result in a lot of bridges and societies being destroyed!

Am I being nitpicky? After all, I agree with the rest of the post. No, probably not. The deconstructionists and other English department jerks are not benign and merely silly. On the contrary, they are highly destructive creatures.

Oregon State University (which I attended and from which I dropped out when about 30 hours short of a degree) only had two requirements university-wide. Every freshman had to take "Writing 121", and everyone was required to take three PE courses. All the requirements more specific than that came from the various colleges within the university.

The College of Science required us to take something like 45 hours of humanities, plus we had to take a 3-term physical science sequence (I took Physics) and a 3-term biological science sequence (I took Zoology). The College of Engineering at the time required all its students to take Statics and Dynamics. (And because of that I was really glad I was in the College of Science.) Other colleges had similar substantial requirements.

I myself did extremely poorly in "Writing 121". It was a pass/fail course and I did pass it, but not without struggle. (I only really learned to write well much later.)

What I would suggest is that maybe there should be some sort of universal requirement for every freshman to take a one term course called "Critical Thinking" which would be taught by the Philosophy Department. Such a course would go into things like basic logic and construction of valid arguments, deduction and induction and why induction is both more powerful and more prone to error, the difference between theories, evidence and axioms and how they interrelate, fallacies of argument and reasoning (most especially post hoc fallacy, but also talking about things like "reference to authority", begging the question [taking as axiomatic what you're trying to prove], argumentum ad misercordiam, Argumentum ad ignorantiam, and in particular Argumentum ad logicam though not under those names), an introduction to probability and a discussion of coincidence, a discussion of why unfalsifiable theories are both true and useless as well as other basic concepts from epistemology, a discussion of the flaws of eyewitness testimony, and so on. I could see such a course also venturing into things like basic game theory as well as visiting the Prisoner's Dilemma, the Tragedy of the Commons and the Free Rider problem.

The ultimate point of the course would be to try to instill an understanding of what I think of as rigor in arguments, analysis and thought processes. A different way to look at it is that it would teach students how to be skeptical.

Being exposed to these kinds of ideas would make a big difference later, though it might take years to bloom (just as I only really began to be able to write well when I was in my late 20's). None of this stuff is difficult to comprehend; it can be made accessible to a general audience, and in fact much of it can be made really interesting. The problem now is that most people never really encounter much of it.

Of course, certain departments in the University would fight tooth and nail against this because it would drastically reduce the susceptibility of students to their cults, which don't survive exposure to rigorous analysis.

(By the way, I have another comment about Jane's post up on my site. Basically, the modern world has mostly been created by engineers rather than scientists, but this supports Jane's basic point even better because the engineering sensibility is even more committed to pragmatism and objectively verifiable results than the science sensibility.)

dsquared wrote:

>You might notice that you couldn't bring yourself to write that sentence without
>putting in the qualification "all else being equal", which immediately alters it
>from a statement about the world to a proposition of pure metaphysics which is no
>longer falsifiable.

The concept of “all else being equal” is at the very heart of the scientific method. That is, the assumption in any experiment is that only one variable is changing from one test run to the next. If you’re going to deny that this is possible then you’re reverting to the “how can anyone really know anything” type of argument.

A better way to describe the “falsifiable statement” is “a method of prediction which will not fail due to unknown reasons”. There won’t be some mystical unknown force that makes producers sell less stuff because its price went up--if this occurs, it will be for a discernible and unique reason.

>>a diabetic's demand for insulin does not rise as the price of insulin falls,

See above. Diabetics don’t buy more insulin as the price falls for the reason that their demand for insulin is fixed independently of economics. You’ll note that they don’t buy _less_ as price _increases_, either. This is because of something known as inelastic demand which is covered in basic economic studies.

Orbitron, wrt to your please comment...are you suggesting that the skillset of the labor force had nothing at all to do with the fact that we're no longer in a tech boom?

Clearly you didn't have to hire anyone in a technical capacity between 97-01. Furthermore, how many companies spent untold billions trying to work around people who weren't in the right industry much less the right job?

"I cited the basic idea of supply and demand, on which all economists agree"

For the benefit of those who came in late, could you say exactly what this "law" is?

"By the way, I have another comment about Jane's post up on my site. Basically, the modern world has mostly been created by engineers rather than scientists, but this supports Jane's basic point even better because the engineering sensibility is even more committed to pragmatism and objectively verifiable results than the science sensibility."

The modern world may have been created by scientists & engineers.

But an *acceptable* modern world was created by lawyers, philosophers, economists, & artists other students of the "soft subjects".

The Soviet Union had some great engineers & scientists; but worship of technology isn't sufficient for a civilized society.

And I say this as an engineer. Our job, as Herbert Hoover said, is to make for 50 cents what any fool can do for a buck. We leave the harder question of what to do with our hard-won cost savings to others.

On the issue of which is harder, humanities or science, my experience is that they have quite different curves of hardness. To get along, to get a passing grade or do just good enough work, is easier in the humanities than in the sciences, but to do extremely well is harder.

To get along in the humanities you need to have a rough outline of a few good ideas, to get along in the sciences you need to grasp quite a fair bit. Once you're getting along it's easier in the sciences to lift your game and be really good than it is in the humanities because sciences (or at least physics, chemistry and economics) is more about grasping principles and applying them, and the humanities are more about knowing heaps and heaps of facts and being able to pull them together.

Also when you make a mistake in the sciences it's a lot more easier to find out you have than in the humanities. Often the universe forces it on your attention.

Which ties in with two other things of my experience, the average quality of scientists should be higher than the average quality of humanities not because science teachers are ideologically inclined to being tougher, but just because you need to be better to stay in the game. And that the sciences have made more progress than the humanities, the top people may be equally as good but in the humanities they're struggling with far less tractable problems, and the universe delivers worse feedback.

Oh, and as for why engineers and scientists get hired for jobs where the maths is much simpler than anything they learned at uni? Because now I've struggled through vector calculus, I know what a second differential is as unthinkingly as I know my own name. Once you've done a lot of advanced maths most basic maths is like second nature, you know it well enough that when you're working with it you can focus on the problem you're solving rather than the tools you're using. It's like climbing Mt Victoria after climbing Mt Everest as opposed to climbing Mt Victoria after a life on the Canterbury plains.

I might point out, Tom, that it's generally the humanities folks, not the engineers, who are advocates for socialism and its lookalikes.

Jane, oh now there's a wild-assed generalization if I ever saw one. What evidence gives you even the slightest amount of confidence that humanities folks are more open to socialism than their engineering counterparts?

How ironic it is that it had to be you that proved your own point. :) hahahah

It's not a wild-assed generalization -- survey after survey illustrates that in general, engineering schools run much more conservative than humanities departments. Or would you care to offer some disconfirming evidence?

>Furthermore, how many companies spent untold
>billions trying to work around people who
>weren't in the right industry much less the
>right job?

See, Dilbert is funny, but it is funny for its exaggeration of the truth and not its exact depiction.

"It's not a wild-assed generalization -- survey after survey illustrates that in general, engineering schools run much more conservative than humanities departments. Or would you care to offer some disconfirming evidence?"

Texeira & Judis's quote a 52-to-40 Democrat v. Republican amongst professionals in 2000. IIRC, Democrats also had the edge amongst folks with graduate degrees, but lagged amongst those with Bachelor degrees only. I'd say the %age of graduate degrees that are scientific/technical or vocational is higher than than for bachelor's level.

(That having said, native-born Merkins studying science & engineering at the graduate level are usually a minority in their departments.)

Also, Santa Clara valley voted 2-for-1 Gore in the 2000 elections. If there's a geekier part of the world than San Jose/Santa Clara, I'd like to know.

(C'mon Megan. Come up with some quant data. We know you can do it.)

hi density duck,

"See above. Diabetics don’t buy more insulin as the price falls for the reason that their demand for insulin is fixed independently of economics. You’ll note that they don’t buy _less_ as price _increases_, either. This is because of something known as inelastic demand which is covered in basic economic studies."

i want to disagree with this example offered. the bottom line is that insulin is not a perfectly inelastically demanded good. demand here is effective demand--i want it and i can pay for it. at some point as price goes higher and higher, people will stop being able to effectively demand insulin, and they will turn to a subsitute--called prayer. as far as i can tell, there is no purely inelastic good. just ask ethiopians who dies of starvation in earlier days. they may have demanded grain, but they did not have effective demand...

also, while i am at it, i just have to tell you that i am "shocked, simply shocked i tell you!" by the "prejudices" that i am seeing on offer here.

(best yorkshire miner accent: "literature' awww, that's nuthin! when i was a lad, we had to do 525 calculus problems befor' breakfast, un then go to 30 hours of lectures and labs a day!!!"

apologies to monty python. could we not find examples of folks who did work in eco and in history. and found them both difficult. i smell a whiff of mathematico-phallic-centrism.

motto: it all depends--on you, your desires and willingness to work, the institution, the teacher, etc. why are you taking a ceteris parabis approach to something with so many variables? ok, a guess--its because we are trained to do that.

another observation:
why are some of you so happy to see economics as "a pristine" fountain of mathematical clarity, divorced from the "chaotic inebriation" of the humanities? i am sorry, much of this mathematical theorizing is not very helpful in economics. what is helpful is an imagination, and dare i call it, a poetic sense (one of the things that economics could in fact take on board in greater amounts). i know we all owe samuelson a great debt for helping to mathematize eco, along with debreu and arrow, but do any of you feel that maybe, just maybe the baby got thrown out with the bath water? in the process of increasing rigour, we ended up squashing the ability to "think outside our box"? in other words, progress in economics will not come from more and more of this incremental mathematical modelling that economists currently favour (experimental eco is an attempt to do this. i'll be interested to see where it goes). ultimately, i suggest that it will come from the impetus of a sensibility that marries the rigour we have found in eco today with the untidy intuitions and poetic imaginations of those "untouchable" and "lazy" disciplines that many folks here disdain.

example of a problem: economics of risk assessment/management (for i cannot bear to call it the economics of uncertainty--which would seem to suggest, erroneously, that we have an economics of accurately modelling uncertainty). it is ironic that keyenes, a mathematician, ended up saying:

"we are merely reminding ourselves that human decisions affecting the future, whether personal or political or economic, cannot depend on struict mathematical expectation, since the basis for making such calculations does not exist; and that it is our innate urge to activity which makes the wheels go round, our rational selves choosing between the alternatives as best we are able, calculating where we can, but often falling back for our motive on whim or sentiment or chance."

maybe you think keynes is wrong (my guess is many of you will disagree with his sentiment). if so, good luck on getting a science out of "uncertainty"...

I have now posted the classic Kling essay on the two cultures topic: http://arnoldkling.com/~arnoldsk/aimst5/klingm.html

I think that one of the basic problems that is inherent in the social sciences like economics and sociology is that these soft sciences are more prone to being affected by a sociological equivalent of the Heisenberg principle in psychics. In essence, the very fact of observing a phenomenon changes what you are trying to observe.

An economic model which exhibits predictive qualities which are demonstrated by objective results gives the "players" a rule book which
they can use to modify their behavior so as to take best advantage of the rules to their benefit. As more and more of the players change their strategies to take advantage of these rules, the underlying dynamic which was described as the "rules" of the model will change, and the validity (predictive power) of the model could vanish.

To use a simplistic example to illustrate the point, consider an ancient sage sitting with his friends along the bank of a river watching a strange tribe float past on a group of rafts. The sage, knowing that the river will shortly go over a very steep waterfall, confidently predicts in a loud voice to his companions that all or most of the raft people will die, because of the waterfall. But, one or more of the raft people hear this prediction, and soon the knowledge is spread amongst them. They then decide to head for shore before they come upon the waterfall. The end result is that none of the raft people die, and the sage's prediction turns out to be false. The plain fact is however that his prediction only became false because he enunciated it and the knowledge spread to those who would be affected by it. If he had kept his prediction to himself then it would have come true.

Despite certain rules, such as the law of supply and demand, most economic models are actually descriptions of mass behavior. Unlike atoms and photons, people's behavior can and does change in response to how they perceive they should act in order to acheive their own best interests. A model which describes behavior at any given point in time can become invalid at a later point for this very reason. Although I am not a marxist (far from it) it may well be that any economic model may indeed contain within itself the seeds of its own destruction.

My sweet, you seem to have mistaken this for a paid endeavor. I do not crunch numbers for this blog, except at my own discretion. I've been working all day, I'm crystal clear that I've seen the figures saying what I asserted, and now I'm going to bed.

Daniel Davies writes: "Predictive validity" is a vastly more restrictive standard than "making falsifiable statements" and I don't know of any serious philosopher of science who would use a "predictive validity" standard.

I couldn't say what philosophers of science think (and I'm not sure I really care, either), but I tend to take any given field of science seriously by evaluating the extent to which it has spawned engineering. That's not just because I'm an engineer; it's because engineering is by its nature inherently a process of using science to generate predictions, and testing those predictions empirically. If the device an engineer creates doesn't end up working the way he expects, and he can show that it's not a result of a design problem, then he's found a problem in the theory itself. (And that has actually happened, and scientists were forced to revisit the theory.) But if a given field of science is mature enough then this won't happen; the engineer will use the science in his engineering and the results will actually be what was expected because the science is actually right.

So this actually is what Davies objects to: an evaluation of a field of science primarily based on its predictive validity. If it doesn't permit prediction at all, it can't be used in engineering. If it makes predictions and they are wrong, engineers won't use it. If engineers are using it routinely, it's a major reason to believe that it is right.

It's obvious that this concept applies to such scientific fields as physics and chemistry. If Quantum Mechanics were badly wrong, polymer chemistry and solid state physics wouldn't work, and we would not have plastics or computers. Every time you turn your computer on you're testing Quantum Mechanics, and it keeps passing the test. That's a very powerful form of confirmation.

But it also applies to some of what we think of as the "soft sciences". For example, I don't consider the field of psychology to be as mature as modern physics, but I also don't consider it to be total pseudoscience. Much has been learned in psychology which has practical application.

One reason is that much of modern advertising and marketing are based on psychology, and whether we like it or not they're more effective because of it. (We don't often see cases where advertising is created without that background but such cases do pop up now and again and they are usually laughable.)

I make no claim that anyone besides me uses this means of evaluation, but I do suggest that it's a good heuristic for determining the reliability of any given field of science. On that scale, economics rates above psychology but below physics.

'cas' asks me, yes steve, it can, but the question i ask would be for what purpose?

There's more to economics than just making predictions about the economy. I accept Daniel's statement that Von Neumann wasn't primarily responsible for initial analysis of the Prisoner's Dilemma. However, I do know that Von Neumann used his knowledge of some of these issues and his general knowledge of game theory in order to help construct the political justification behind what we all came to know as "the principle of mutually assured destruction" during the Cold War, which had the effect of preventing a nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States. It performed exactly as Von Neumann said it would based on his knowledge of economics. His goal was to prevent the US being devastated by a nuclear attack, and this was the way he found to do it.

And it worked. That's pretty important.

I work at one of the largest research libraries in the world. I speak with faculty and students in many fields every day. I know a lot more engineers who can read Balzac in French than I know English professors who can solve a second order equation (or even know what one is!). However, the English professors have opinions about lots of subject where the knowledge of math is essential;they refuse to acknowledge this. After all all knowledge is socially constructed-isn't it? I mentioned to a womens studies prof who said this to me that I hoped her mechanic did not believe that Newtons second law was socially constructed-boy was she pissed off!

i smell a whiff of mathematico-phallic-centrism.

When in doubt, bring fruedian penises into the discussion. Its not an argument, but at least it's distracting.

Right, Cas?

It's obvious that this concept applies to such scientific fields as physics and chemistry. If Quantum Mechanics were badly wrong, polymer chemistry and solid state physics wouldn't work, and we would not have plastics or computers. Every time you turn your computer on you're testing Quantum Mechanics, and it keeps passing the test. That's a very powerful form of confirmation.

And its also why people who loudly jeer the "theory" of evolution while eating bioengineered foods and most ESPECIALLY when using modern medicine are frickin idiots.

Drug manufacturers are engineers for the medical sciences, and if evolution in geometric progression fast-forward didn't actually happen in viruses and bacteria, they would have found out by now.

Note that the underlying science doesn't have to be perfect yet, it just has to be close enough. Engineers built just fine using newtonian physics, but they do even better nowadays.

Grr. Closing the italiac.

Howdy,

very interesting comments and they all answer one question, if you put 30 economists in a room and ask a question you will get 32 answers.

all of the medical doctors i know, believe that the practice of medicine is an art and not a science. this simply reflects while science underlies the practice, dealing with the human condition makes each patient relationship materially different.

i view all of the social sciences in a similar manner, in that the building blocks are not constant but migrate over time as the dynamics of the community changes. and economics as a measure of the those dynamics is most atuned to applied mathematics.

thus, if you ask 30 astrogeophysicist about dark matter and i would expect 32 different answers.

I'm closing the italics

Matt Johnson: "Orbitron, wrt to your please comment...are you suggesting that the skillset of the labor force had nothing at all to do with the fact that we're no longer in a tech boom?"

"Nothing at all" is a bit extreme, but it's not far off the mark. During the boom a large part of the "demand" for tech labor was phony. The people running the dot cons only needed programmers, sysadmins and the like so that the companies they worked for looked like real businesses instead of schemes for fleecing VCs and small investors.

At present there is a glut of tech labor on the market. Given the importance you seem to be assigning to its availability, we should be in the middle of a boom right now.

Jane said, It's not a wild-assed generalization -- survey after survey illustrates that in general, engineering schools run much more conservative than humanities departments. Or would you care to offer some disconfirming evidence?

Nice way to perpetuate your position without offering any evidence other than "surveys after surveys." You didn't think I'd fall for the banana in the tailpipe trick did you?

The fact is the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA surveyed over 55,000 faculty and found that liberalism was on the increase in higher education (34% said they were middle-of-the-road, 18% said they were conservative and 48% said they were liberal).

Furthermore, when entering freshman were asked about their political views. Their responses showed that political views were not related to ACT score or parent income.

You can see more of these studies here: http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/heri/heri.html

Need more?

Who said this about the war in Iraq?

"I think we've run out of people's butts to kick and that we essentially want to keep the butt-kicking going."

A Chemistry professor at Swathmore.

Who said the war on Iraq was created by, "Israeli apologists and [U.S.] government officials" who share a "tribal affiliation" (in other words, are Jewish). The only purpose of war would be to provide cover for Israel to commit what he calls "even higher atrocities"

A Genetics professor at Yale.

See more at http://www.campuswatch.org

You're welcome to your views, but saying that because engineers are more scientific they must by definition be more conservative is like saying females are against the war in Iraq because females aren't naturally aggressive. I know you don't agree with the former, so why suggest the latter?

Sorry Matt, but that just doesn't cut it. Saying there are a couple left-wing science professors does not prove the sciences aren't overwhelmingly conservative relative to the humanities (and to a lesser extent the social sciences). Ms. Galt probably never said ALL science profs were conservative (I haven't read this whole thread, but I doubt she would claim something so stupid).

"The fact is the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA surveyed over 55,000 faculty and found that liberalism was on the increase in higher education (34% said they were middle-of-the-road, 18% said they were conservative and 48% said they were liberal)."

I don't know if you're being deliberately dishonest just to make people mad at you (trolling) or if you're just ignorant, but your quote is irrelevant to the question of whether people in the hard sciences TEND to be more conservative than people in the English department.

You obviously belong to the literary side of the debate because you don't think facts have any meaning outside of whatever you construct for them. If you say a fact refutes one of Galt's arguments, in your fantasy world, it automatically does. You obviously don't have a very strong grasp on logic. I won't accuse you of being drunk because I doubt you are old enough to purchase alcohol.

Interestingly enough, in the Soviet Union, the engineering faculties were more reliably Communist that the arts faculties, who were notorious for incubating capitalist counterrevolutionary dissidents ...

I think Stephen's measure of the "worth" of a science is somewhat on track (I owe a rather nice living to the fact that economics has spawned at least one form of engineering, albeit that there is nothing in what I do that wasn't in Ricardo and Hume). But it's probably more of a measure of the maturity of a science than a measure of whether something is a science at all. I don't find myself wanting to claim out of hand that some subjects are "unscientific" just because they happen to be attacking very difficult problems with an insufficiently developed mathematical toolkit.

On the subject of what "all economists" think, I make the following three points:

1. "All other things being equal" is a vastly more demanding criterion when one stops dealing with repeatable experiments and starts dealing with events occuring in unrepeatable historical time.

2. All social sciences subjects have platitudinous overgeneralised statements that "everybody agrees on"; economics is not special in this regard. All social sciences also have to admit that these generalisations are not relevant whatever to the real world unless they have been embedded in a far more complicated model on which there is no consensus; economics is also not special in this regard.

3. "Objects falling in a vacuum" is a limiting case to which actual falling objects can be shown to tend. A Marshallian partial equilibrium analysis of a single market is not a limiting case of anything.

Tom said:

>(That having said, native-born Merkins studying
>science & engineering at the graduate level are
>usually a minority in their departments.)

That's a bold statement. Please back it up. (I realize that counterexamples prove little, but my Aero Engineering class had thirty members of which two weren't WASPs, and one was a third-generation New Yorker and the other a Ukranian immigrant.)

Since the majority of the world refers to us as "Americans", I think it's about time you started doing the same.

cas said:

>the bottom line is that insulin is not
>a perfectly inelastically demanded good.
>...at some point as price goes higher and
>higher, people will stop being able to
>effectively demand insulin,

Except that you're positing astronomically high prices at this point, prices so high that they break the model. Or, rather, you're assuming that there is some factor external to the analysis that limits people's buying power--some arbitrary "maximum price" that people can't exceed. This condition isn't part of the very basic model we use to explain the concept of inelastic demand. Insulin is a convenient good which is _almost_ perfectly inelastic, enough so that it's not a huge mental leap to understand what a perfectly inelastic good might look like.

>just ask ethiopians who dies of starvation in
>earlier days. they may have demanded grain, but
>they did not have effective demand...

There was a price, but it was too high for many of them to pay. I never...well, actually I _did_ say that the demand for insulin was perfectly inelastic, and I didn't qualify my statement with "like" or "analogous" or anything of that sort. Yes, it is possible for one not to be able to buy insulin because of that maximum-price thing I mentioned earlier. But even so, that isn't a supply/demand curve issue--the demand curve for insulin is still a flat line, it's just at different levels of demand as the price exceeds people's ability to pay. Not so much a demand curve as a demand stepladder.

Matt,

Your quotes are completely ancedotal, I could likely dig up competing quotes at a ratio of 5 mine to 1 of yours. In any case, its less than proof.

And read your own statistic:

34% said they were middle-of-the-road, 18% said they were conservative and 48% said they were liberal.

Now, see if you can figure out the common thread here. I could hit you with several reasons why you don't take what a person says is their political alignment as gospel, but a bright boy like you should be able to figure out some on his own.

And the political makeup of entering freshman means nothing at all as to how their departments lean or behave. Be serious!

Matt, I've seen surveys showing that the engineering departments run to the right of the humanities department. You're proving strong cases I've never made: "all engineers are conservative"; "all humanities people are liberal". Furthermore, you're doing it by wildly abusing the data. None of it is relevent to the question of whether faculty in engineering departments are more conservative than humanities; your numbers either apply to the whole; to a different, irrelevent group; or they're anecdotal. It's also survey data, which is crappy -- the surveys I saw at least asked people for party/group affiliation, which although it's subject to lying, at least is not subject to the wildly subjective views on where the middle of the road is. (All my high-liberal New York Democrat friends think they're smack-dab in the political center even though they'd cut their arm off before they voted Republican.)

There are limits to the usefulness of numbers. They're often all we have -- but that's precisely why people should understand statistics and the scientific method, so that they don't get impressed by a pile of shiny numbers, or conversely, decide that data is irrelevent. Your comment seems to me to be a good example of how humanities people fail to understand the limits and uses of statistics -- unless you're deliberately waving around irrelevent numbers in the hopes of fooling people, which I doubt.

I'm aware of the limits of my knowlege. I've seen surveys showing that engineers are more likely to vote Republican than any other faculty, which jibes with my experience having known and worked with hundreds of engineers. It's possible, of course, that I'm wrong. The sample of engineers I know, and that of all the other people I've talked to who've known hundreds of other engineers, could be skewed in some way. The surveys could manifestly be poorly designed, and survey data is inherently unreliable. I wouldn't claim that this data is irrefutable. But it is not, as you claimed, a "wild assed guess". One of the things we humanities people have to learn to appreciate is that it is not possible to apply the scientific method to every single thought that ever passes through our head, but nonetheless we must make assertions, predictions, and decisions based on imperfect information. That's supposed to inform our understanding, not hobble it.

"After all all knowledge is socially constructed-isn't it? I mentioned to a womens studies prof who said this to me that I hoped her mechanic did not believe that Newtons second law was socially constructed-boy was she pissed off!"

Gosh, what was I saying earlier? On a prudent and rational basis, I consider all those possessing a Liberal Arts Ph.D. as an idiot until proven otherwise. Their degrees are often fraudulent and we should not hesitate in stating the obvious.

"On a prudent and rational basis, I consider all those possessing a Liberal Arts Ph.D. as an idiot until proven otherwise."

I need to have another cup of coffee this morning. This sentence needs to be revised to read:

"On a prudent and rational basis, I consider all those possessing a Liberal Arts Ph.D. as idiots until proven otherwise."

Oh well, perhaps I should add a few more insights. Do you really wish to know why these liberal academics normally vote Democrat? The answer is patently obvious: the Democrat Party protects incompetents! These clowns know which side of their bread is buttered. Republicans would tell them to go out and earn what they get. There’s no reason to overcomplicate everything. It’s just that simple. Democrats are generally stupid people.

"After all all knowledge is socially constructed-isn't it? I mentioned to a womens studies prof who said this to me that I hoped her mechanic did not believe that Newtons second law was socially constructed-boy was she pissed off!"

Everybody knows deep in their guts that Democrats are usually stupid people. However, the moronic “womens studies prof” can probably successfully sue for slander if you rightfully declare her degree to be fraudulent! Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a few court case dealing with the accusation of academic fraud? It would almost certainly do wonders for our nation.

Don't make the mistake of automatically mixing Democrat with liberal (or conservative with republic to a lesser extent). Most lawyers are democrats, for instance, yet many lawyers tend toward conservatism. The Democratic Party simply supports the interests of lawyers to a greater extent. The same applies to union members. Never mistake naked self interest for idiology.

Mark is exactly right; college lecturers vote Democrat for the same reason farmers vote Republican; because they (correctly) believe that this is the party that will do most for their incomes.

I'm not sure that case holds, D2. I haven't noticed any appreciable difference between farm state Democratic and Republican support for farm subsidies -- in fact, I haven't noticed any difference between the parties on the topic, as "screw the farmers" doesn't seem to be a campaign theme anywhere. The farmers I know vote Republican because they're fiscally and socially conservative, not because they think the Republicans do better on farm subsidies. As far as they're concerned, Hillary is doing a more than adequate job hauling home the pork, it's just that they hate everything else she stands for.

"You obviously belong to the literary side of the debate because you don't think facts have any meaning outside of whatever you construct for them. "

You know, the constant juvenile sense of superiority on these threads never ceases to amaze me. It's not possible for people with different world views to both be smart. Liberals disagree with conservatives because the former are illogical or stupid or fuzzy-headed. No exceptions. Maybe we can start a thread about how conservatives are better looking, better athletes, or better at sex?

Do those knowledgeable about the humanities have nothing to offer the world, because they can't build a toaster or a microchip? Does no one recognize that the Western culture you all have been so bravely defending (on the internet) against the threat of Islamic terror is largely a culture resulting form it's philosophy and poetry and literature? There are plenty of Arabs trained in computer engineering. That's not the problem with Middle Eastern society. Why should someone who loves poetry so much that he wants to teach it be a slut? JRR Tolkien must have been a huge whore.

And what the hell does it mean to say that more humanities graduates are open to socialism than engineers? What is this supposed to mean? Socialism, which takes a variety of forms in the real world, is ipso facto so obviously stupid that only a fuzzy-headed poet would ever consider it? Does history even bear this out?

Let me tell you the difference between conservatives and liberals: first principles. Efficiency vs. stability; individualism vs. empathy. Things like that. And one more thing: the ability to see that any issue might actually have more than one point of view.

By the way, to suggest in anyway that scientific training is a primary motivator in personal politics will be difficult to prove. It hardly overcomes things like ethnic loyalty and nationality. I would be interested to see how the ideological break-down looks after you include the fact that many engineering profs are Arabs, South Asians, and Chinese. Does the logic so allegedly ingrained in the minds of computer engineers demand that they all agree on the awfulness of socialism? I doubt it.

I want to emphasize this point. If we're starting out with different sets of first principles or values, then the fact that we reach different conclusions is not necessarily the result of bad logic. If your starting positions are different, it isn't unexpected that the ending points will also be different. A friend of mine is an Indian born citizen of Holland. He's an economist at a quasi-governmental contractor to the World Bank. He and I have had this discussion, with me condemning Europe's contentment with high unemployment and low growth in exchange for greater egalitarianism (yes, me, a liberal). His point was that in the successful economices in Northern Europe, they value egalitarianism and personal stability and are uncomfortable with a gap between rich and poor as we have in the US. If they enact policies which reflect those values, what's the problem? And he was right. Why would you assume that they are illogical because they define terms like liberty and justice differently than you? (And don't bring out your moral-relativist flash cards. I'm not talking about Islamic fascists, but Swedes and Dutchmen.) Maybe differences like this are the cause of any identifiable political differences between hard-headed engineers and fuzzy-headed non-scientists, to the extent that such differences really exist.)

For those who have have quibbled with Dsquared's example of Insulin demand as demonstrating some of the problems with the laws (in fact theories) of supply and demand as applied to the real world over actual time by saying that this is covered by the caveat of demand elasticity Jane Galts own example on the labour market is illuminating.

All things are not equal in the labour market, and not just in the trivial sense, but more fundamentally in that there is no way that it can be isolated from other markets - all wages affect demand generally, general demand will affect the demand for labour , labour costs affect prices, prices act upon demand , the price of labour affects the supply of jobs. I probably missed a few realtionships there, but the point remains that none of these relationships can actually be isolated from the others, all of them involve open feedback loops. Even assuming that all these varaibles can be expressed formally , and even if we could build a model that excluded or could set constants that represent the other ineracting parts of an economic system, we already have system that is complex in the way that Chaos theoreticians use that term.

SDB makes some very good points about an education in critical thinking. I'm not sure how such a thing could be taught, but I know it was sorely lacking for me...until I got out of school and screwed up enough times to learn to think hard before committing.

BTW this is one reason why engineers are widely thought to be overly conservative. It's not because we're stick-in-the-muds. It's because those of us who have any experience to go by have learned from hard experience to consider the unlikely when designing, because the unlikely will happen. Usually while you're demonstrating your product for the customer, too.

English (or whatever your spoken language is) composition is a vital skill for engineers. It's hard to get any respect if you can't manage to communicate outside of mathematics.

It seems to me that the reactions to the Sceptical Environmentalist from the environmental community provides a nice example for Jane's premise.

Jane Galt wrote: "The war in Iraq, they said, was about oil. [...] Rather, the object of the war was to get Iraqi oil so that we could keep it away from Europe and, by impoverishing them, improve our own lot. [...] There were a number of very strange economic ideas in there, but one is demonstrably incorrect [...] I tried to explain this to them. All three of them reacted as if the very idea of referring to the economics of oil markets to test the validity of their argument were some sort of wacky notion, like trying to disprove it using the tea leaves at the bottom of my cup."

I have two reactions to this. First, it is impossible to "disprove" the students' argument using purely economic models. The students' argument only requires that U.S. decision makers believe that such a policy would be effective. The fact that controls on commodities have not worked in the past does suggest that this is probably not the intention of the U.S. Even so, it does not "prove" anything. If you could disprove government policies by showing that they would be economically ineffective then Jane Galt has just proven that NY has not had rent-controlled apartments for the last 50 years.

Second, Jane Galt seems to be missing the forest for the trees. The students' comments indicate apparent beliefs that bear consideration. The comments suggest that they believe that the U.S. government has ulterior motives for the war, the U.S. is willing to lie to further those ulterior motives, the motives involve using Iraqi oil for personal and nationalistic gain (the specifics are really irrelevant), and that the U.S. and Europe are going to increasingly vie for power in an apparent zero-sum game. Those are important issues that Galt seemed to ignore by engaging in yet another round of "my discipline is better than your discipline."

Steven Den Beste Wrote:

"By the way, I have another comment about Jane's post up on my site. Basically, the modern world has mostly been created by engineers rather than scientists, but this supports Jane's basic point even better because the engineering sensibility is even more committed to pragmatism and objectively verifiable results than the science sensibility."

I'm not sure that I'd agree that engineers are, by virtue of some inherent sensibility, especially committed to pragmatism.

Currently I'm going to business school. The business school I attend has a reputation for being particularly quantitative, so it tends to attract a lot of engineers, who probably make up 30-40% of each year's incoming class.

(Broad generalization alert!) I can say many nice things about the engineers as a group. They tend to be brighter than the non-engineers. They tend to be harder working than the non-engineers. They tend to be more open to new ideas than the non-engineers. They tend to be better natured, more humble, and more cooperative than the non-engineers.

What I can't say is that they are more pragmatic than the non-engineers. In fact, as a group, the engineers in the program tend to be more wedded to abstractions that are theoretically elegant but practically inapplicable than the non-engineers. They tend to be quicker to apply reductionist thinking than the non-engineers, even though such thinking leads to bad analyses and bad decision making in the face of complex, ambiguous problems. They tend to be less likely to question professorial authority than the non-engineers, relying on academic authority much more than their classmates (If you ever hear someone begin an argument in a b-school class with "Yes, but Porter says..." you're more likely than not listening to an engineer).

The students who do tend to be the most pragmatic in business school are the folks who worked in sales and marketing before business school. Nobody's BS detector is more finely tuned than a former sales jock's is. And this group, ironically, tends to have a lot more undergraduate humanities majors in it than any other subset of the business school population.

Now, I have no doubt that all those former engineers were "ruthlessly pragmatic" in their former lives. They are all successful people, and being successful in engineering requires pragmatism on the job. But put them in business school, where the subject at hand isn't engineering, and they rely more than other group of people on theory and abstraction. That doesn't mean that they are doomed to ruinous careers in business. Quite the opposite, most of these engineers will be quite successful in corporate management. But they tend to learn a new kind of pragmatism when they leave business school, a pragmatism that relies much more on the wisdom of well-formed intuition than it does on the certainties of mature natural science.

I suspect that what attracts most people into engineering in the first place is not so much that they are inherently uber-pragmatic, and want to work in a field in which they will be judged only by the concrete fruits of their labor, but rather that they are good at math and find structured problem solving to be a lot of fun, and realize that they can make a good living in engineering with those attributes. Once they get in to engineering, they are required to do useful work because that's what people are willing to pay for, and they engineering training has prepared them to do useful work in this context. They are pragmatic because they are judged by their results and because their education prepares them to do useful work in the context of an engineering job.

But when engineers move into a corporate management role, they need to realize that the skill set that was pragmatic in engineering is often not the skill set that is pragmatic in their new environments. Its no longer always useful to break complex problems down into their component parts, because managerial problems are laced with so much ambiguity and complexity that it becomes impossible to say where one part of the problem ends and one part begins. Its no longer always useful to propose solutions that are objectively better based on measurable criteria, because the social and political context in which those solutions are debated, adopted and implemented doesn't always recognize objective superiority. Now, you can say that engineers' habits are only detrimental in managerial jobs because the rest of the world is silly, irrational and stupid. Fight that fight if you'd like. Just don't call it ruthlessly pragmatic, because tilting at those windmills will cost you more time than you have on this Earth.

And don't say that managers apply the science of economics just like engineers apply the science of chemistry. As a columnist for my b-school's student newspaper so elegantly put it a couple of years ago: "If I went to work for IBM and told them to price their mainframe computers at the point at which marginal revenue equals marginal cost, they'd fire my ass." Managers study economics because it shapes their managerial intuition in useful ways. Someone who has spent some time tooling around economic abstractions like smooth demand curves and perfectly informed consumers will be less likely to make certain common errors of business judgment that tend to afflict those who haven't studied economics. Nine times out of ten though, they're still making largely intuitive decisions - and that's pragmatic, because rigorous, step-by-step analysis is just not possible within the time and informational constraints that most managers operate. (This, by the way, if the only reason I think a prospective business person should go anywhere near game theory. Studying game theory helps train our intuitions, opening up our subconscious thought processes to complexities that we would miss if we were stuck in first order thinking. But if you're ever in a business meeting and your boss whips out a payoff diagram and says that he's calculated the sub-game perfect Nash equilibrium for your industry, run, run dear child to the nearest computer and update your resume because your company is going down.)

But that's not the same thing as saying that chemical engineers use their study of chemistry to help shape their chemical intuition, which they then rely on to do their do their engineering work. No, chemical engineers use actual chemistry. They don't say "My gut tells me that this reaction will add a ketone group to that molecule. Let's go with it!"

The point is that you see engineers being pragmatic and think that it must be because there's something about the discipline itself that breeds a pragmatic sensibility. I would argue that the engineers you see are pragmatic because they tend to work in environments in which there are real, important, and measurable consequences (positive and negative) for their performance on the job, and that their academic study of engineering prepares them to thrive in that environment. As pragmatic as most working engineers are though, they are less pragmatic than most working salesmen, who tend to face even more direct and more dramatic consequences for their performance. A bad engineer may be fired after a year, and makes his full salary during that year. A bad salesman is fired after three months, and gets paid beans during those months. Want to know why so many humanities profs seem like flakes? Its called tenure.

Are you suggesting that no-one in the national security council understands the concept of a commodity? No-one is claiming that it is impossible, simply that it is so wildly implausible that serious people dont give it a serious second thought. That is one of the symptoms of this problem, the people of this mindset we are discussing do not understand the principle that just because an idea is not impossible, that it should be given equal standing with any other point of view.
Combined with the classic conspiracy scenario such as this
"the U.S. is willing to lie to further those ulterior motives, the motives involve using Iraqi oil for personal and nationalistic gain (the specifics are really irrelevant), "
and you get the basic peacenick pary line. 'We're not sure if Bush is trying to raise oil prices or lower them, but he's up to something because thats the kind of guy Bush is'. Contrast that with a debate over the actual evidence on each side of the argument and the premise looks ridiculous. If I'm not mistaken, thats the bottom line of this whole thread.

Amitava, re: your comments on Northern Europe,

I have no problem whatsoever with other countries choosing different political/economic systems based on their own system of values. My question would be whether or not the citizens of those countries recognize the trade-offs they are making. Do they associate their lower growth rates and higher unemployment with the economic choices they have made, or do they happily vote for increased government largesse then complain when they can't get a job or their standard of living is lower than other Western nations? Are they truly making the informed choices that you suggest they are?

I'm sure your economist friend has a good handle on this, but then it's easier to vote for stability when you already have a comfortable job.

Now, I have never voted for a Democrat in my life, but "Everybody knows deep in their guts that Democrats are usually stupid people" strikes me as a ridiculous statement.

Look, on the one hand, 99% of everything is crap, and 49% of Americans are below average, so yeah, lots and lots of people are stupid, including lots of Democrats.

But come on people. Really. If you have never met an intelligent Democrat then you need to broaden your circle of interaction.

If you really believe that Democrats are noticeably stupider than Republicans... well, we're talking about the two cultures in this thread. This is a falsifiable claim. Let's see the IQ tests.

IMHO neither the scientist (Jane Galt) nor the engineer (Steven Den Beste) is shaping the modern world.

Technological progress is the natural state of mankind. Even before acceptance of the scientific method technology progressed and spread; the wheel, iron, bronze, the crossbow, etc.

Political freedom, however, is the exception to the natural state. For, what, 3000 years of recorded history the vast majority of people have lived in virtual slavery to other people or proscribed traditions. Everywhere there were rulers and subjects, nothing else.

The Soviet Union had world class scientists and capable engineers often besting the US (sputnik) yet its political system was the same old same old, a few people ruling the majority of people through the application of force. Their ideology and political system failed, their people became poorer, weaker and less happy. They are relegated to a minor role in the world.

People everywhere probably have similar intellectual capabilities but innovation comes largely from the liberal western world (we don't look like post-feudal Japan but modern Japan looks alot like us, we don't look like Dynastic China, but modern China looks alot like us).

It makes me more appreciative of the Framers. Without scientific method, without empirical tests, but with knowledge of history and insight into human nature (the mushy disciplines) they created a durable instrument to secure freedom not only for themselves but for several generations after them and did the most to shape the modern world.

I think the present liberal arts major is uninformed because they are taught no coherent history, not because they fail to apply scientific standards to their dicipline.

I'm not a scientist -- I'm just a lit major with a web site and a dream.

Amitava Mazumdar wrote "His point was that in the successful economices in Northern Europe, they value egalitarianism and personal stability and are uncomfortable with a gap between rich and poor as we have in the US".

And therein lies a problem. First, I would define liberalism vs conservatism as "emotionalism" vs "pragmatism". 'Egalitarianism' is an emotionally loaded word. Labeling a gap between rich and poor as a negative thing in and of itself is a value judgement. This judgement may be (in fact is) at odds with economics. There is ample empirical evidence that hobbling the highest earners will ultimately lower the success of all earners. Liberalism would suggest that it is preferable to accept this crippling of the economy for the 'egalitarian' goal it has created (the European model of high unemployment and low growth). A pragmatist would argue that a rising tide lifts all ships, and that it is better to be in tune with economic realities than to reject those principles in favor of theoretic models. Reality is the ultimate arbiter and realty has shown that the poor are consistantly gain more wealth in a Capitalist system than in any quasi-socialist system. Ultimately, one could persuasively argue that attempting to tune your policy to the underlying fundamentals of economics is the more scientific approach, as opposed to the more nebulous path of arbitrarilly deciding what is 'fair' at the expense of freedom.

Thanks for an interesting debate starter. I have nothing to say on the question of whether economics is a "real" science or not, or if the National Security Council is capable of grasping what a "commodity" is, but as an English Lit major, I can certainly agree that Lit Crit types could use a bit more Crit in their thinking. Here's a perfect example: In my "Theories of
Globalization" class, we read chapters from a book by David Harvey, a social critic who is sometimes mentioned in the same breath with guys like Jameson and Baudrillard. He tried to bolster his theory of postmodern "space-time" compression by spending a chapter reviewing time-space physics theory. He bungled everything, beginning with this howler: He thinks light-years are a *time* measurement. It went downhill from there: To take another of many egregious examples, he cited the fact that (1) physics paradigms about the fundamental properties of space-time have changed through the centuries as PROOF that (2) individual human beings subjectively experience time and space
differently from each other in their daily lives, depending on their cultures. While the second statement may or may not be true, the first statement has no bearing whatsoever on the issue. When I took this point up with the professor after class, he told me I was just "pissed off" because I didn't like the author's "frivolous" rhetorical maneuver. I tried to tell him I was "pissed off" because the author was demonstrably *wrong*, but that went nowhere. And this guy Harvey is apparently cited by postmodernist lit critics all the time...*sigh*

A physicist of my acquaintance read The Dancing Wu-Li Masters and said, "If y'all can't get into physics without getting everything wrong, I think I'd prefer y'all just left it alone."

Wow. This may be the best thread ever on Jane's site. Great comments from many people. Thanks to all. The only, quite minor, observations I have to make are:

sd's remarks pertaining to engineers in positions that entail substantial amounts of non-engineering work are interesting. I have found that people who have been good engineers and then gone on to successful sales careers are among the most valuable talents any endeavor can enjoy. The combination of skills entailed in such people can really drive an organization.

Regarding differences between European and American attitudes, if we could get all the people who value egalitarianism over dynamism to live in one place, and all the people who reverse their preferences in another (understanding that everyone places differently on the spectrum as to their strength of preference), and most importantly, have the two groups agree to leave each other alone, would anybody be any happier, and would either group be better off?

Will Allen Wrote:

"sd's remarks pertaining to engineers in positions that entail substantial amounts of non-engineering work are interesting. I have found that people who have been good engineers and then gone on to successful sales careers are among the most valuable talents any endeavor can enjoy. The combination of skills entailed in such people can really drive an organization."

Absolutely! I certainly didn't mean in any way to denigrate the engineering skill set, but rather simply to point out that it is imcomplete (of course, so is every other skill set!), and therefore that people moving from engineering into other lines of work will need to continue to learn and develop - that their engineering skills, pragmatic as they may be in an engineering job, are not enough to do useful work in other kinds of jobs.

Look through the roster of Fortune 500 CEOs, and you'll find lots of former engineers. You'll also find a lot of people who majored in the humanities in college. In all cases though you'll find people that didn't stop learning when they left formal schooling.

hi density duck,
thanks for the response. it is good to see that you have a sense of humour!

as for steve's comment on game theory. yes it is useful; i am pretty sure that the ideas are not new though. would you consider mad a variant of the balance of power motif that has been part of european history for the last 3-4 centuries? is the idea of total destruction so radically new as to deserve von neuman as a "saviour" of the western world?

"Density Duck quoted me as saying:
>(That having said, native-born Merkins studying
>science & engineering at the graduate level are
>usually a minority in their departments.)

That's a bold statement. Please back it up. (I realize that counterexamples prove little, but my Aero Engineering class had thirty members of which two weren't WASPs, and one was a third-generation New Yorker and the other a Ukranian immigrant.)"

http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/infbrief/nsf02316/start.htm

Year 2000 Engineering doctorates: 5,330. NSF identified ~2,200 as US citizens, ~2,800 as non-US (with ~300 unknown). Plus, some of the US citizens might be naturalized citizens. Your 90%+ whitebread A.Eng. class appears anomalous.

Anecdotally, the sciences (particularly the biomedical sciences) might have more US-born. Figures on that page show that US-citizens are a slight majority for Physics PhDs awarded (about 54%).

There's also a bunch of anecdotal info based on personal experience I could add, but it is probably slanted 'cos I am in Northern California, which 'cos of its sizable Chinese- and Indian ex-pat communities, probably is an outlier in terms of %age of foreign-born scientists & engineers.

MAD was a very specific structure, much more complicated than most people understand. But even the concept is, I'd argue, new -- most balance of power wars were limited proxies or empire builders, constructed along tit-for-tat, which is emphatically not what MAD was about (in fact, MAD was designed to avoid tit-for-tat that might cause escalation to nuclear holocaust).

I think the present liberal arts major is uninformed because they are taught no coherent history, not because they fail to apply scientific standards to their dicipline.

To me, that's the same thing. History is more than a list of facts, it's theories about why one thing followed another -- attempts to extract causation from correlation. If you're studying history, you are studying political science, sociology, and economics, and you can't help but learn to be rigorous about it.

In fact, as a group, the engineers in the program tend to be more wedded to abstractions that are theoretically elegant but practically inapplicable than the non-engineers. They tend to be quicker to apply reductionist thinking than the non-engineers, even though such thinking leads to bad analyses and bad decision making in the face of complex, ambiguous problems. They tend to be less likely to question professorial authority than the non-engineers, relying on academic authority much more than their classmates (If you ever hear someone begin an argument in a b-school class with "Yes, but Porter says..." you're more likely than not listening to an engineer).

This may be actually a kind of back-handed reflection of the pragmatism of engineering as a discipline. After all, in the engineering field, an authority is an authority because, pragmatically, he or she has been right a lot ("a lot" meaning to an engineer "almost always"). Elegant theories are appreciated, again pragmatically, because they tend to be correct (again, "tend to" means "almost always"). This is a reasonable approach for an engineer to take in his own field, and it seems natural to the engineer that the same approach would work just as well in other fields. It is the engineer's own unique form of intellectual laziness (and I say that not as a slam against engineers but because it is a flaw I have long combated in my own "engineerist" way of thinking). The engineer thinks: these approaches must have undisputed value, else why would they waste my time and theirs teaching them? This assumption has obvious flaws of its own in certain fields.

To expand on the last part of my message, I mean that the tendency of the engineer is to believe that the things they are learning have immediate and obvious application to understanding the matter at hand and solving problems. Especially at the beginning of learning a new discipline, they may underestimate the importance of learning background material, since it's been so long since they had to learn any.

Jane,

If I could have found these surveys that show that engineering schools lean to the conservative more often than humanities, I would have posted a link. Clearly from my own political bias, I'd prefer that this were the case.

Nonetheless, I couldn't find these surveys that you speak of, but I could find the one that I cited. It seems to me to have a fairly large (55,000) sample number and it concludes that a vast majority of those sampled do not identify themselves as conversative. Therefore, I have to conclude, by making, as you say, "assertions, predictions, and decisions based on imperfect information," that it probably isn't very likely that engineers are so uniformly conservative given that the numbers of conservatives in the faculty are so low.

Yes, its a stretch and yes its cleary unscientific, but given that you haven't produced anything to support your own position, we're left with nothing to criticise (interesting tactic don't you think?).

Not to mention I do think its slightly humourous that you've gone from "scientific people are more rational" to "scientific people know when not to apply the scientific method." Sigh...

But Matt, the numbers you're showing are still irrelevent. They don't tell us the breakdown between engineering department faculty and other faculty, which was the item under discussion. The size of the sample isn't helpful if the numbers aren't a propos.

I'm not a shill for the scientific method. I think it's the best method we have for finding truth. But thinking that you know what's going on because you've stuck any old number on something is no better than thinking the numbers are irrelevent . . . tomorrow, I'm going to try to put out my thoughts on what English majors have that engineers don't.

Orbitron wrote During the boom a large part of the "demand" for tech labor was phony. The people running the dot cons only needed programmers, sysadmins and the like so that the companies they worked for looked like real businesses instead of schemes for fleecing VCs and small investors.

At present there is a glut of tech labor on the market. Given the importance you seem to be assigning to its availability, we should be in the middle of a boom right now.

If demand for these workers was phony to begin with, wouldn't that in of itself explain with they are out of work now? My position was not that we needed more "programmers, sysadmins and the like," but more engineers.

Many people say that growth on the internet is constrained due to there not being a last mile solution. Whose going to solve that problem? A sys admin or an engineer? If we'd had more of them [engineers] working on the problem earlier, maybe 802.16a would be implemented already.

Other people say that growth on the internet is constrained due to not enough applications driving high bandwidth needs. Well, lets look at the personal computing interface -- Windows2000 was probably the worst OS for hardware support ever...that certainly didn't help much -- but more importantly, are people using their computers differently than they were 10 years ago? Perhaps they are to some degree (mp3's for example), but is the change from then until now enough to drive continued economic success in the tech industry today? nope. Why is that?

Obviously this is a chicken and egg paradox but I would suggest that part of the reason is due to not enough innovators [ie, engineers] being present both at worker and management level.

Girlfriends.

I'd most certainly use numbers showing the breakdown of faculty positions if they existed. But since I can't find them and you can't produce them, what are we left with?

A guy who says he's right but has irrelevant numbers and a girl who says she's right because she says so.

Let me add something different to this thread.

The issue as to whether Lit should be Physics is not the main problem. Lit and other humanities can be more rigorous in argument, no question about that. It SHOULD also encourage careful analysis BUT

As an empirical observation, (from my perch as a faculty member of an Unnamed U) students predisposed to Lit and Hums don't want to deal with hard reasoning and analysis.

This is not unrelated to the fact that grading is easier in these subjects than in the sciences, eng, and economics. As a result the Hums tend to attract many (not all) of the weaker students. Again, my observation is that students with high Math SATs can make it through Lit programs more easily than Lit majors can make it through SciEng programs.

This contributes to artificial Two Cultures problem and worse -- it drives students out of Science.

As studies in the Journal of Economic Education have suggested, at the margin, this reduces the number of students willing to enter technial programs. The disparity in average grades means that easy grading Hum degrees are poor signals of ability. However, a student at the margin may prefer to be labeled an A Hum student rather than a C Physicist.

This is sometimes known as the Lemons problem in Economics.

Were Hum classes as tough as the best Latin/Greek classes of a 100 years ago you would have far better grads and far less PoMo nonsense in my opinion.

My 2.5 cents worth.

Let me add something different to this thread.

The issue as to whether Lit should be Physics is not the main problem. Lit and other humanities can be more rigorous in argument, no question about that. It SHOULD also encourage careful analysis BUT

As an empirical observation, (from my perch as a faculty member of an Unnamed U) students predisposed to Lit and Hums don't want to deal with hard reasoning and analysis.

This is not unrelated to the fact that grading is easier in these subjects than in the sciences, eng, and economics. As a result the Hums tend to attract many (not all) of the weaker students. Again, my observation is that students with high Math SATs can make it through Lit programs more easily than Lit majors can make it through SciEng programs.

This contributes to artificial Two Cultures problem and worse -- it drives students out of Science.

As studies in the Journal of Economic Education have suggested, at the margin, this reduces the number of students willing to enter technial programs. The disparity in average grades means that easy grading Hum degrees are poor signals of ability. However, a student at the margin may prefer to be labeled an A Hum student rather than a C Physicist.

This is sometimes known as the Lemons problem in Economics.

Were Hum classes as tough as the best Latin/Greek classes of a 100 years ago you would have far better grads and far less PoMo nonsense in my opinion.

My 2.5 cents worth.

Let me add something different to this thread.

The issue as to whether Lit should be Physics is not the main problem. Lit and other humanities can be more rigorous in argument, no question about that. It SHOULD also encourage careful analysis BUT

As an empirical observation, (from my perch as a faculty member of an Unnamed U) students predisposed to Lit and Hums don't want to deal with hard reasoning and analysis.

This is not unrelated to the fact that grading is easier in these subjects than in the sciences, eng, and economics. As a result the Hums tend to attract many (not all) of the weaker students. Again, my observation is that students with high Math SATs can make it through Lit programs more easily than Lit majors can make it through SciEng programs.

This contributes to artificial Two Cultures problem and worse -- it drives students out of Science.

As studies in the Journal of Economic Education have suggested, at the margin, this reduces the number of students willing to enter technial programs. The disparity in average grades means that easy grading Hum degrees are poor signals of ability. However, a student at the margin may prefer to be labeled an A Hum student rather than a C Physicist.

This is sometimes known as the Lemons problem in Economics.

Were Hum classes as tough as the best Latin/Greek classes of a 100 years ago you would have far better grads and far less PoMo nonsense in my opinion.

My 2.5 cents worth.

sd wrote:
"[Engineers] tend to be less likely to question professorial authority than the non-engineers, relying on academic authority much more than their classmates (If you ever hear someone begin an argument in a b-school class with "Yes, but Porter says..." you're more likely than not listening to an engineer)."

Well, if you ask questions during an engineering class, you're falling behind on copying down the equations from the board. Too risky for me.

Aside from that, great post on the limits of engineering thinking, except for:

"No, chemical engineers use actual chemistry. They don't say "My gut tells me that this reaction will add a ketone group to that molecule. Let's go with it!"

Umm, you haven't worked with many ChemE's, have you? (If it doesn't work on the first pass, then heat, beat, recycle). Certainly in biochemical engineering and polymerizations, there is an unbelievable amount of Black Art. Or read the "Chromium" story in Primo Levi's "Periodic Table" for a nice example.

"Especially at the beginning of learning a new discipline, they may underestimate the importance of learning background material, since it's been so long since they had to learn any."

Fuck that memorization shit. I'll derive the background material from first principles. Hey, I'm good at math. It'll be easy. Where's my graphic calculator?

Dont relegate the 'fudge factor' to the softer fields. Damn near every science uses it to some degree, in fact quantum physics only works when a voodoo 'renormalization' process is used that no-one understands. Einstein used the seemingly arbitrary 'cosmological constant' to make his general relativity equations work. Later these nebulous slight of hands often turn into exciting new paths of exploration in themselves. Thats why its unfair to charactorize fields like economics as being unquantifiable. Its likely just a matter of time before the science and the number crunching catch up to the mathmatics and the theories.

I thought I'd do my part and close the italized text here

This looks better.

How about this?

There are two books on engineering that cast an interesting light on this thread; The Ghost of the Executed Engineer and The Revolt of the Engineers.

The first is a real tragedy, since it describes one engineer (and many common citizens) in Russia who were willing to work themselves to death to build a new fair nation after the revolution. Their enterprises didn't fail because socialism couldn't inspire people the way personal greed does, but because the political superstructure was captured. (Personally, I think it's obvious that socialism is a natural human response in embattled circumstances.)

The Revolt of the Engineers is about the history of engineering as a profession in the States, and describes the political history that made business management the promotion path for a good engineer. This has (book has examples) sometimes led engineering associations to put corporate loyalty above accurate application even when the bridge fell down. Pragmatism, but not of the admirable kind.

Anecdotally, I've known lots of engineers who could cap Shakespeare quotes. Most of them could also cap Mahabharata quotes, which alas I can't.

"I haven't noticed any appreciable difference between farm state Democratic and Republican support for farm subsidies....."

I suspect the difference has more to do with population proportions (there's a lot of farmers in farm states, but there's not many places with a lot of professors, demographically) than anything else.

Also, while Democrats will outbid Republicans when it comes to farm interests all the time, I'll be damned if I can remember a time that the Republicans outbid the Democrats for professorial interests.

Jane, here in the Central Valley of California( from where we send you the best produce and charge 3X what it goes for here, heh, heh) the farmers vote Repub for the most part. There have occasional Dems on the State and Congressional level, but being Repub used to be a lifetime meal ticket on the State level, and still is for the Rep. who is Repub. The more interesting fact is that with high rates of unemployment, welfare and food stamps, the Repubs are still popular. This is because the farmers like 18% unemployment rates, as it means they can be sure of cheap labor to pick their crops.

"It seems to me that the reactions to the Sceptical Environmentalist from the environmental community provides a nice example for Jane's premise."

I think Lomberg's (a statistian) reaction to environmental scientist critics published in Sci.Am were an even better example.

Julian Simon once said that, since the number of points in a line is infinite, resources can never run out. George Gilder picked this up. I don't know if Lomborg also repeated it, but he seems to support Julian Simon.

Do I need to explain to people here that Simon's original statement was flat-earth lunacy? I hope not. And yes, he really did say that.

So anyway, the problems we're dealing with are not limited to liberal-arts liberal types.

Here's the Simon quote:

"The length of a one-inch line is finite in the sense that it is bounded at both ends. But the line within the endpoints contains an infinite number of points; these points cannot be counted, because they have no defined size. Therefore, the number of points in a one-inch segment [of a line] is not finite. Similarly, the quantity of copper that will ever by available to us is not finite, because there is no method (even in principle) of making an appropriate count of it..." (Simon, "The Ultimate Resource", Princeton, 1981, p. 47)

http://gadfly.igc.org/papers/cornuc.htm

Wow. Helluva thread.

I’d really like to put my two cents into this, but I’m a little nervous about doing so because my background is so enormously different than anyone else’s here (as far as I can tell). Of course, that’s also why it’s germane. Hopefully I’ve piqued your interest; I’ll get to the meat of it in a moment.

First, though, I’d like to address the little sub-thread about political orientation as it corresponds to the “two cultures”. I, too, would like to see some cites on the correlation that Jane describes. Having said that, my own personal experience supports her view. How much is that worth? Well, it’s worth just as much as it’s worth. People in the US use the terms “conservative” and “liberal” as if their conventional views of what these terms signify correspond to some Platonic ideals. But they don’t. Are we talking temperament? Or specific policy? Or something demographically or temporally normative? That some conservatives that I’ve met — such as the gentleman up-thread — will assert that engineers are rational people and thus are naturally conservative (along with an implicit or explicit impugning of the rationality of liberals) without critically examining their use of the term “conservative” indicates to me that perhaps they’re assuming too much about their own ability to be rational and critical thinkers. Something to ponder.

My own education strongly repudiates the notion that “the two cultures” is an educational inevitability. I attended St. John’s College (of Annapolis and Santa Fe), the famous “Great Books” school. It’s a set curriculum with no electives (well, a few credit hours of electives only).

Many people assume that the curriculum there is essentially similar to something like a literature or philosophy degree consisting of reading the main texts of the western tradition. That’s a misunderstanding. SD talked earlier about how the Liberal Arts once were taught and that mathematics is one of them. At SJC, for example, mathematics is taught all four years. From Euclid through Newton and Leibniz to Lobachevsky, even Gödel and others — there’s a solid grounding in math. Let me be clear: this is not a textual survey of these works, it’s actually working through these works. (I want to also be clear that both in math and in the sciences, this work absolutely does not adequately substitute for the huge amount of practical skills that one acquires as part of getting a math or science degree elsewhere. This approach provides only a minimal technical facility. On the other hand, it provides a very strong foundational comprehension — something I’ve found conventional educations to lack in comparison.)

Also the “Program” includes three years of laboratory science (one year is set aside to allow music to be taught instead). This also involves reading and working through most seminal works, and a considerable amount of actual laboratory experience. To take just one example, seniors perform the Milliken oil drop experiment. They work through Einstein’s Special Relativity paper.

As for the rest of the Program, it’s two years of Greek and two of French (freshmen translate portions of Aristotle’s Physics, Homer, and the NT, for example), the year of music (which corresponds to about two at conservatory), and reading and discussing all those damn books. The program is not critical in the postmodern sense, certainly. The texts are taken as much as possible at face value, and, aside from the context of the Program itself, ahistorically. (This is very naïve in some ways, and it certainly has its shortcomings. On the other hand, it means that the approach is not beholden to any au currant academic theory.)

And the whole enterprise is as integrated as possible.

It takes an unusual person in these times to want to pursue this course of study. People really do tend to divide, at least initially, between which of the “two cultures” they have a greater affinity for. I’m a math/science person myself — before I attended the College I had been a physics major elsewhere. For other people, though, when the program becomes very math/science heavy in junior year it can be quite a struggle.

Does it work? I think it works very well. My very strong impression is that we approach the level of rigor in literature and philosophy that many people were speculating about up-thread. The tremendous successes of science’s empiricism is certainly not lost on the students; and I strongly suspect that Smith and Marx, for example, are approached with far more empirical skepticism than they are by most people who read those writers.

I’m old enough now (38) that it’s probably not realistic for me to consider grad school these days. But, when I do — because, in a way, I can’t help it — economics or one of a few of the even “softer” sciences is what I have in mind. And I can’t imagine not approaching them with the same empirical rigor of the more “respectable” sciences. Is that realistic? Not exactly. One thing that the social scientists (the good ones, anyway, is my impression) are beginning to understand is that the hard sciences are really the easiest sciences. Their problems are toy problems. I’m quite partial to complexity theory, by the way, and I don’t see most of the future development in all the sciences being amenable to the sorts of simplistic analysis that we’ve heretofore been so successful with. That isn’t an indictment of empiricism and quantitative analysis, by the way. It just means that we need to develop better tools. But I’ve digressed.

This cultural divide doesn’t have to exist. I hate it. To me, it’s not an inevitability; it’s at least partly just an accident of history. I think Jane’s criticisms are in many ways spot-on, although she probably overstates her case. From my perspective, contemporary humanities departments have gone off the deep end (see: Sokal’s prank), but that contemporary science departments have become technical schools. The two ships are sailing in opposite directions, and they’re getting farther and farther apart. It doesn’t have to be this way.

(Please forgive me if in any way I made this an advertisement for my alma mater. That wasn’t my intent. I think they do things the right way, of course; but my real aim was just to show that not all of academia exhibits such a schism.)

Re: the Simon quote:

"Similarly, the quantity of copper that will ever by available to us is not finite, because there is no method (even in principle) of making an appropriate count of it..."

That is so stunningly stupid that I have a lot of difficulty believing that it's properly in context or that it's not actually some sort of a joke.

Hmm. And by the same "principle", I supose that motion is impossible. Heh.

With regard to the idea that "predictive validity" and the ability to serve engineering applications makes something a science: I owe my career to the existence of engineering applications of linguistics, pragmatics, semantics, psychology, cultural anthropology and philosophy. Except for linguistics, most practioners of those fields would laugh at the notion that predictive validity plays a meaningful role in their fields, and the linguists who think they are working with models that have strongly predictive consequences are fooling themselves.

The most foolish and useless ideas in my field have come from those suffering the worst physics envy. I have a degree in a physics and in all the years that I studied science, little in the way of a specific scientific method was ever introduced, except for a few platitudes about experiment and hypothesis which even we knew had little do with the actual history of science. What we had was a lot of practical methods of investigation, rules of thumb, and some epistemological biases that largely went unsaid. And, in nearly ever case, there were some significant exceptions. That's pretty much the same as what linguists and I expect economists have.

That is the whole problem with wanting to make humanities students familiar with the scientific way of thinking. In principle, I am not opposed to broadening the general educations of university students, but science is a practice, not a method. There is no simple set of scientific principles that can be introduced in a set of lectures. Trying to teach a manufactured scientific method will, inevitably, lead people to believe less of what scientists say instead of more. Peter Duesberg's case against linking AIDS to HIV is predicated entriely on arguments about predictive validity and default hypotheses, as are the arguments in The Bell Curve. There is a serious risk that trying to teach a fixed scientific method will actually give ammunition to crackpots.

I support the idea of advancing scientific literacy, but a better way to go about it might be to treat it like a current affairs class. Take contemporary issues and investigate them in some depth. Hopefully, this would give students a set of primitive notions within which they can understand scientific issues and convince them that scientific questions are not beyond their ability to understand.

>>"Similarly, the quantity of copper that will ever by available to us is not finite, because there is no method (even in principle) of making an appropriate count of it..."

>>That is so stunningly stupid that I have a lot of difficulty believing that it's properly in context or that it's not actually some sort of a joke.

It's not stupid and it's not a joke. The question Simon was drawing attention to is one that's typically ignored by neoclassicals, which is the issue of what constitutes an "appropriate count" of something like copper. Clearly an ounce of copper in our current economy is not all that much, but an ounce of palladium is a hell of a lot of palladium.

The amount of copper we need (and therefore, the amount of physical copper needed for us to give a positive answer to the question "are we running out of copper?") is dependent on the state of technology. If you believe (as Julian Simon does and I don't), that technological progress is monotonic and infinite, then the rate at which copper is consumed by our using it might be less than the rate at which we improve our ability to economise on the use of copper, giving his argument its Zeno-like quality.

The point is valid and the context you provide reveals this. On the other hand, the analogy is still stunningly ignorant. Unlike a line, copper is not infinitely divisible. His analogy rests upon an assumed similarity that does not exist.

This is an example of the sort of thing that people like Jane — and me — complain about. Simon's point is completely valid. But to give it some veneer of, um, whatever, he invokes an inappropriate mathematical analogy. It's revealing that you got across to me the idea in less words and less pretense.

Still strikes me as stupid. Just an example of how economics is so formalized that it brackets out every aspect of physical reality whatever. Some formalizing assumptions make a theory harmful (worse than useless) as a tool for understanding reality.

In the case of copper, a problem surely arises when you start using sheets of copper less than one atom wide, but probably well before that.

Another case from Simon is substitutability. Aluminum can be substituted for copper, etc., etc. What can be substituted for clean air, clean fresh water, or topsoil? (Hydroponics is still not economical for growing any legal product). These things are not only absolutely essential, but are needed in enormous quantities.

Simon frequently argues by analogy: something like "50 years ago X said that this-or-that was impossible, but it turned out to be possible; today Y says that some other thing is impossible, but we can be sure that it will turn out to be possible too". Very bad logic; lots of things that were impossible a century ago are still impossible, and lots of forgotten optimists (e.g. perpetual motion, cold fusion, water as auto fuel) made fools of themselves. People talking about interstellar travel as a solution to earth's problems are a contemporary loony example IMHO.

The comparison is absurd. A line is a mathmatical construct that does not exist in reality. Copper is an element. It cannot be subdivided further than a single atom without ceasing to be copper. A line can be subdivided infinitly, which is one aspect of what makes a line. One of the problems that seperate mathmeticians from scientists (let alone lay people) is, obviously, math. It is generally assumed that all physical phenomena can ultimately be derived from mathmatics. On, the other hand, it is also clear that not all mathmatical formulas are manifest in reality. This makes it especially dangerous for clumsy 'amateurs' (like myself) to toss around mathmatical formulas as evidence of some particular behavior.

"Aluminum can be substituted for copper, etc., etc. What can be substituted for clean air, clean fresh water, or topsoil? (Hydroponics is still not economical for growing any legal product). These things are not only absolutely essential, but are needed in enormous quantities. "

These are the hysterical arguments that keep the greens in business. History makes it clear that technology consistantly provides for both cleaner and more renewable resources as the market dictates (and government edict, admitedly). Population projections already shown humans leveling off, and successful industrialization speeds this process. Every western nation is at zero population growth or negative when immigration is ignored. Water and air are cleaner in western nations than they were 40 years ago, while industrial capacity dwarfs that period. Every energy source has been significantly cleaner than the last (oil over coal, gas over oil, nuclear over all of them). Agricultural production in orders of magnitude more productive in the west than the 3rd world. The problem on Earth is a lack of capitalism, not resources. Enviro wackos convinces starving African countries not to accept genetically engineered food is the problem, not the solution. And there again is the divide between science and logic, and emotionalism.

===In other cases, such as sociology and political science, it's possible that you could, but don't yet. That's why discussions in those courses tend to revolve around the speakers' opinions on human nature, interesting and possibly right but very difficult to either prove or falsify.

Economics actually revolves around an assumption about human nature--called rationality. In other words, your critique of sociology and political science fails to grasp that economics only avoids this problem only by assumption. Quality research testing the assumption of rationality and other potential types of decision making is currently being undertaken by economists, political scientists, sociologists and even psychologists.

If you bothered to read the political science literature or the sociology literature you might understand they are playing a rather important roles testing human behavior and how humans process information. And those hypotheses being tested certainly are falsifiable.

Shockingly, a field is often much more than what is taught in classes. Of course, before dismissing other fields of endeavor, it would be appropriate to understand scientists don't prove things, mathematicians do.

Prisoner's Dilemma should be credited to neither John von Neumann nor John Nash, but to A. W. Tucker (who was also at Princeton).

"From my perspective, contemporary humanities departments have gone off the deep end (see: Sokal’s prank), but that contemporary science departments have become technical schools. The two ships are sailing in opposite directions, and they’re getting farther and farther apart. It doesn’t have to be this way."

I'm going to maybe contradict myself here and say it's not necessarily a bad thing if the sciences focus more on the applied end of things.

Frex, the Bayh-Dole act in, oh, 1981, gave Universities & Labs doing contract research for the Feds much more rights to the IP produced from research. The year after Bayh-Dole, Cohen & Boyer founded Genentech with IP from Stanford & UCSF (and a couple of other institutions), which, after 8 years or so, became a company with 80%+ gross margins. The new bioscience labs at UCSF built with Genentech's $$$ (from donations & lawsuits) are extremely spiffy, where doubtlessly great work will be done. None of that would have been possible without Bayh-Dole.

One more reason to love Bob Dole, if his stance on Yugoslavia in the 1990s and his Jack Kemp joke wasn't enough.

Mark, that was slogans and analogies, and you were all over the goddamn map with geneticall-engineered food, for god's sake. And after what you just wrote, don't YOU tell ME about emotionalism.

What I asked was about substitutability. Being able to substitute aluminum for copper is one thing. If there are substitutes for topsoil, air, and water tell me. We have finite amounts of them and they're only weakly renewable.

These are not imaginary future problems. Much of the Mediterranean and much of Central Asia used to be more fertile. Soil depletion or degradation (salt) is part of the reason. Most of the world's fisheries are in serious trouble. These are concrete questions about physical reality that geographers, environmentalists, climatologists can tell you about, but which economists are formally incapable of discussing and which many futurologists try to deceive us about.

Ilya Prigogine, physical chemist and Nobel Prize winner, important in chaotic systems etc., says that the more successful sciences are the ones which have chosen questions which have definite scientific answers. Newton's Laws of Motion were very hard to come by, but the system itself is not difficult to understand. ("Order Out of Chaos" is his general-interest book; highly recommended).

Claims to scientificity tend to be power claims by one field of study over another. If the scientifically weaker system is studying a more difficult (perhaps formally unpredictable)topic, perhaps with chaotic answers, etc., the power claim is transformed. If the things studied by the "weaker" science are important, the questions have to be studied even if the result is less deterministic.

Imagine a scientific (predictive) cardiologist debating with a less-scientific (less predictive) endocrinologist. Scientific one-upsmanship might lead the cardilogists to ignore everything the endocrinologist says, but that would be a mistake. "The operation was a success, but the patient died").

Policy questions appear at the point where there is no longer certainty. Some on these threads seem to have that longing for certainty and distaste for messy policy disputes.

It remains true that there some policy proposals violate what is known, and treat economics as if it were all open policy questions and no science. However, going to DeLong D-squared, or Sawicky tends to weaken my estimate fo the degree to which econ is science and not just policy. Lots of big uncertainties.

I agree that there is an incredibly large amount of crap in the social sciences that hides under the umbrella of 'science.' However, from my own experience, there is some good work in the realm of sociology. While I am automatically skeptical of anything puporting to show 'victim hood' based on demographic qualities, demography itself, the study of populations, is a very scientifically rigorous field. In the general field of sociology, you do have a breadth of scholarship that ranges from pie-in-the-sky theorizing to rigorous measurements. The former isn't sociology, its philosophy, and because it is easier than the latter, too many engage in it.

You'll have to forgive me, I find myself responding to multiple threads.

"If there are substitutes for topsoil, air, and water tell me. We have finite amounts of them and they're only weakly renewable. "

I that were the case how has life on earth thrived for 3 billion years? Humans have been around for 5 million. Still seems like there is an aweful lot of air and water around. How is the air and water in most every city in America cleaner than it as 20 years ago? How is it that farmlands in places like southern Europe have been tilled for tens of thousands of years and put out record production? Recent studies show that the earth has been warming since the Middle Ages and new farm lands in areas like Siberia and huge swaths of Canada become more arid. This somehow reduces food production? 70% of the worlds fresh water is stored in ice caps. We're running out of water? There are many _real_ scientists that have informed opinions about the outlook for the climate and human interaction that completely dispute these alarmist ravings. Your so called environmentalists tend to have very little if any science background at all. If you want to look at the most polluted, lacking in water, and starving places on earth, do you look at industrial capitalist societies? Or do you look at socialist and totalitarian states were progress and growth are so stunted that human inventiveness cannot solve these issues? Dont believe the hype. Go see what Patrick Moore (co-founder of Greenepeace) or Norman Borlaug (Nobel Peace Prize winner and probably has saved more lives than any person that has ever lived, go look him up) have to say, people that actually go out an offer solutions to problems instead of hysteria.

"In 1950 the world produced 692 million tons of grain for 2.2 billion people; by 1992 production was 1.9 billion tons for 5.6 billion people -- 2.8 times the grain for 2.2 times the population. "
"The world's 1950 grain output of 692 million tons came from 1.7 billion acres of cropland, the 1992 output of 1.9 billion tons from 1.73 billion acres -- a 170 percent increase from one percent more land."
"Without high-yield agriculture," Borlaug says, "either millions would have starved or increases in food output would have been realized through drastic expansion of acres under cultivation"

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97jan/borlaug/borlaug.htm

JFC, Mark, I was talking about SUBSTITUTABILITY. Please don't give me your canned sermon again.

Topsoil renews at an undetermined slow rate, but not necessarily as fast as it erodes, and this has been a real problem in places. There isn't a lot of unused cultivable land left in the word, mostly in Africa for war reasons.

Ground water replenishes very slowly and they've been mining water in the American West for decades. Local water shortages are a real problem already in many parts of the world. Melting icecaps and running arctic rivers south will give us a bump, but after the bump the same situation (finite supplies of non-substitutible water) will still be there.

I am not putting forth a gloom and doom scenario. I'm just saying that certain resources are finite and not substitutible.

You are doing the exact same goddman stupid thing I accused Simon of, extrapolating by analogy. We've been having successes, so obviously the successes will continue infinitely into the future. That's moondog perpetual-motion thinking.

NOTHING you said was to my point, and when you accused me of totalitarian sympathies you slid a notch lower yet in my estimation.

It is annoying to be accused of emotionalism and hysteria by the likes of you.

SUBSTITUTABILITY. FINITE.

hi ryan,
"When in doubt, bring fruedian penises into the discussion. Its not an argument, but at least it's distracting."

no, it was a comment on what was basically a "peeing" contest on who could get higher up the wall... (my apologies for my vulgarity).

Zizka:

I think you're off in several ways. The first is that copper is finite in the sense that there are so many molecules of copper on the planet, and once we're done with them, that's it. Air, topsoil, and water change and renew themselves, and are thus not in the same category of fixed resources. They may renew themselves at a slower rate than we're using them up, but that's a problem of managment, not fixed bounds.

Second of all, you're trying to argue a proposition no one's making. No one's arguing that we're going to substitute away from air for our breathing. Rather, they think we're going to substitute away from things that pollute the air as the income effect raises our demand for clean air relative to our demand for other things. The evidence for this proposition is rather good.

The environment does not have only one type of question. You can't refute things that people say about one resource by trying to force them to apply it to a totally different resource, any more than I can force you to argue that we should nationalize the toothpaste industry because it works well for the military.

Two pedantic points, quite insignificant in the larger discussion (everyone, especially the apologists for "Economics as Science," should pick up a copy of D. McCloskey's "The Rhetoric of Economics", wherein economists are shown to be working very hard to persuade their readers of the validity of their arguments, something we don't see a lot of in "Physica Review"):

1. Jane refers to changes in price leading to a "change in demand." As we toilers in the field stress to the suffering undergrads in ECO 101, changes in price lead (in the standard model) to "changes in quantity demanded." (I.e., a movement along a stationary demand curve.) This is the controlled experiment (other things equal). A "change in demand" refers to a non-price change in the environment (incomes, expectations, etc.) conditionding the demand curve.

2. The use of insulin as an example of a completely inelastic good (one for which there is no change in quantity demanded for any price change) is pretty standard, but we must remember that insulin is relatively cheap. Raise the price enough, and quantity demanded must eventually fall for any good (how many diabetics could afford insulin at $1,000 per daily dose?). So-called orphan drugs are similar goods, but with high-enough prices so that the consumers cannot afford to pay (or malaria victims in developing countries, for that matter). In this sense, the "law of demand" is trivally true.

The day I saw an economics textbook in which the author took the third derivative of real data and treated it as though it actually meant something, was the day I realised some economists really don't know what the fuck they're talking about.

Zizka,

I think Jane addressed most of your points appropriatly. A few footnotes though, I certainly never meant to accuse you of fascism or anything else. I believe my post pointed out that fascism and socialism are the biggest enemies of a healthy environment and maximum food output. Find me a starving democracy. Secondly, I am not using analogy to make a point. I am proposing a logically coherant extrapolation. High yield crops have expanded agriculture by double using the same amount of resources everywhere its been tried. There are still huge chunks of humanity where it hasnt been implemented yet. China first and foremost. Secondly, you are demonstrably wrong, there are many currently uncultivated parts of the earth that can yet support agriculture, especially if the earth warms as predicted (Siberia and Canada). Thirdly current population projections show the earth population leveling off, especially as China, Russia, and India further industrialize. The Earths resources are not in trouble any time soon. Now in the long term, as you suggest, we are indeed doomed. In 5 billion years the Sun will expand into a red giant and consume the earth. No question. So unless we can find some form of SUBSTITUTABILITY for the Earth, we are indeed in trouble.

'If you believe (as Julian Simon does and I don't), that technological progress is monotonic and infinite, then the rate at which copper is consumed by our using it might be less than the rate at which we improve our ability to economise on the use of copper, giving his argument its Zeno-like quality.'

Ah, ok. Talk about your hidden information in a quote.

A few years back, Jack Daniels was making a lot of money in Japan by selling booze at $60 a bottle retail. They figured that they would reduce the price and rack up more sales. In fact, the price reduction led to fewer sales.

About the same time, Japan National Railroad spent a mountain of money to change its name to Japan Railroad.They also sold off a bunch of land into the hyper-hot Japanese real estate market. The increase in supply reportedly led to an increase in price.

Granted that both of these instances happened in the Bizzaro World of fair Nippon, but they do point up some problems with the fundamental "laws" of economics

We don't need to look to Japan. In an engaging paper of 1991 (JPE), Gary Becker focused on the observed phenomenon that fashionable restaurants, discos etc are often oversubscibed at peak times, with queues effectively developing. Now part of basic economic theory has it that in unregulated, competitive markets prices will adjust to clear markets but that manifestly doesn't happen in those cases. Becker offers an explanatory model to account for this in which the demand curve has a positive slope through part of its domain - meaning that prices can be raised without reducing the volume of demand for some range of prices, an indication of the popular status of some fashionable places.

Economists have a problem at this basic level. We can offer an explanatory model or models to account for such observations but would find it generally impossible to predict ahead instances where the model would apply. At best, economists can specify the circumstances where the model or models applies. There is an excellent discussion of this territory in John Sutton: Marshall's Tendencies - What can economists know?; MIT Press (2000)

Governments, businesses, and people (especially successful stock market operators) inescapably model how markets function so it makes sense to extricate and analyse these models. At least since Hammurabi's Code of Laws from ancient Mesopotamia in the 18th century BC as here: http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/MESO/CODE.HTM governments have legislated, regulated, taxed and spent and monitored market behaviour.

In passing, we can note that Hammurabi's code, in addition to defining and protecting certain property rights, contained elements of a statutory prices and incomes policy. Under-pinning all this and its like downstream were implict models of social behaviour, including the functioning of markets, with and without the proposed government intervention. Inevitable questions arise as to whether proposed government action would achieve intended objectives and as to whether the objectives, if achieved, would indeed be socially beneficial according to some criteria to be agreed. The questions have perennial significance regardless of whether economics is dubbed a science or not.

An interchange on another blog provides an example - the hike in tariffs on US steel imports by the Bush administration a year back. I quote from my comment because it illustrates a classic difference between the ways economists and many non-economists tend to look at trade policy issues:

Apart from breaching WTO international trade rules, which the US subscribes to, the Bush steel tariff hike was a really dumb idea for reasons a competent under-grad economics student should have no problem explaining. The tariff hike will lose the US economy some GDP, which it would otherwise enjoy, and overall cost more jobs in US steel using industries than will be saved in the US steel industry.

When economists Joseph Francois and Laura Baughman, working on behalf of the Consuming Industries Trade Action Coalition, estimated the impact of the steel tariff hike they found:

- Every state in the union will suffer net job losses as a result of the tariffs
- The biggest job losses will occur in "steel belt" states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan
- For every steel job "saved" as a result of the tariff, eight jobs will be lost in all sectors of the economy
- Higher prices for steel products and related inefficiencies would decrease U.S. national income from between $500 million and $1.4 billion
- The steel producing industry would save between 4,400 and 8,900 jobs at a cost of between $439,485 to $451,509 per steel job saved
- from: http://www.mackinac.org/4107

The reasons are not difficult to understand. The Bush steel tariff hike raises the cost of steel to US-based steel using industries facing competition in both the US home market and in export markets from foreign-based steel using industries which won't have the penalty of absorbing the hike in the cost of their steel supplies. The inevitable outcome is that the Bush tariff hike hits profits and jobs in US steel using industries. Foreign-based steel using industries selling into the US market win out.

What’s worse, the US has been through this dumb-play before when President Bush Snr, Dubya’s father, imposed prohibitive anti-dumping duties on imports of computer flat-screen displays in late 1991. The supposedly motivating idea then was to boost US production of flat screen displays. What happened was that US-based assembly of notebook computers moved off-shore to places where there were no anti-dumping duties on imports of flat screens. As there was and is little volume production of flat-screens in the US to speak of - to my knowledge - the effect of the duties was to cost US jobs in notebook assembly. One of the early actions of the incoming Clinton administration in 1993 was to rescind the duties.

Perhaps we should recall Alan Blinder's statement of Murphy's Law of Economic Policy: Economists have the least influence on policy where they know the most and are most agreed; they have the most influence where they know the least and disagree most vehemently. [Blinder: Hard Heads and Soft Hearts (1987)]

I like reading your blog. Thanks for the great site.

I like reading your blog. Thanks for the great site.

I like reading your blog. Thanks for the great site.

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