Kieran Healy

Hats off to D-Squared

Hats off to Daniel Davies for having the energy to do what I do not. He wades into the comments section and says some of what needs to be said about this post by Megan McArdle (aka Jane Galt). She’s writing about the supposedly rock-solid scientific rigor of Economics compared to the humanities and allegedly fake social “sciences” like Political Science and Sociology. As the post and its comments thread show, few topics provide so much opportunity for confidently talking out your ass as the question “Are the social sciences really scientific?”

Informed answers to this question are rare. Instead, you tend to get half-baked ideas about predicability and falsifiability as the criteria for science being put into service shoring up one’s allegiance to a chosen tribe. If predictability looks like a shaky foundation (What? You’re telling me bright young economists don’t get hired on the basis of successful predictions?) the ground can be shifted to the existence of “basic shared premises within the field.” If these shared premises begin to look a bit too metaphysical, then we’ll move to a different criterion. Whatever it takes to preserve the phenomena. It’s easy and fun. All you have to do sacrifice is your consistency. For instance, in comments to her post Megan asserts:

Sociology will assume the science mantle when it stops relying on first person subjective evaluations and surveys

which manages to combine ignorance of sociology, philosophy of science and survey methodology in the space of a few words. She then gets called on a related question a little later, when she asserts engineers tend to be politically conservative and humanists socialist loons. Her response?

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?

Sooo, maybe surveys aren’t so bad, eh? But perhaps those surveys were conducted by University of Chicago economists or something. Meanwhile, Daniel Davies goes on to note that, empirically,

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.

Whoops! Looks like we need an auxiliary hypothesis to preserve the scope of Megan’s scientific generalization and make it non-disconfirmed. (Or non-disconfirmable. That’s the great thing about auxiliary hypotheses.)

Henry Farrell has a good post about all this, picking up on some other issues. James Joyner also makes some useful points in defence of Political Science but, alas, cannot resist saying he shares with Megan a “general contempt for sociology as a discipline”. Here James pursues the appeasement strategy, feeding the economism crocodile in the hope that it will eat him and his field last. (Of course, Rat Choice theory ate Political Science first.) A pity.

In the comments to James’s post, Megan pops up again with this amusing anecdote:

I recall an argument I was having with my ex-boyfriend at dinner about some sociology professor he’d had who did a study arguing that crack gangs behave like businesses—well, not so much a study [sic] as following around the head of a gang. I was arguing that while that may be true, it’s not a social science because you don’t really know it—all you know is how that gang leader behaved when the sociology professor was in the room. As it happens, my best friend is an economist … [she] turned around and started to go into ways you could try to control for observer bias.

“It was a single sociologist following around a drug dealer,” I said.

“Well,” she said “that’s because sociology is crap.”

Hahaha. Funny she should pick that example. The sociologist and ethnographer Sudhir Venkatesh does precisely this kind of work. He’s now at Columbia, but was a grad student at Chicago and is probably the sociologist the ex-boyfriend ran into. Venkatesh “follows gang members around” and so on. (Nothing to it, really. Try it yourself sometime.) In addition to his book, American Project, he has a couple of co-authored papers about gangs acting like businesses. One is called “Are We a Family or a Business?” History and Disjuncture in the Urban American Street Gang. Another is “The Financial Activities of an Urban Street Gang.” The former appears in Theory and Society, a respected Sociology journal I don’t expect Megan to have heard of. The latter is in vol 115(3) of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which she may know about. In both cases, Venkatesh’s co-author is Steven Levitt, the economist at the University of Chicago who was awarded the John Bates Clark medal last week.

Looks like it’s time for another auxiliary hypothesis to preserve those generalizations. Possible candidates include

• Venkatesh is not really a sociologist.
• Levitt is not really an economist.
• The article was published in the special non-scientific section of the QJE.
• OK I’ll grant you that exception but I’m sure you can’t think of any more.
• Sentences written by Levitt were scientific; those written by Venkatesh were unscientific.
• [Fill in as appropriate. Whatever it takes.]

Gaah. Don’t know why I bother, really.

The social sciences have this weird love-hate relationship with “science.” In geography at least, you get half of us begging to be considered a real science and the other half denouncing science as a reactionary servant of capitalist imperialist patriarchy (with mainstream economics as the devil’s favorite tool).

Sociology was of course a science in the days before Human Subjects Review :)

The question of whether or not, and in what ways, the social sciences are scientific is an interesting one. But the way it is often taken up (e.g., at the discussion to which you link) just gives me a headache: it’s not so much the assertions themselves as the air of certitude and tone of lofty dismissal. Ok, it’s the assertions too. I particularly object to the outright dismissal of entire disciplines on the basis of ill-formed and inaccurate generalizations and half-truths.

Nice job.

The propagation of half-digested chunks of Popper is a real menace. I can’t help thinking that a healthy dose of Lakatos would do plenty of people a power of good, perhaps leading to fewer outbreaks of this kind of obviously dumb nonsense.

The problem with popular takes on the philosophy of science is perhaps that practitioners in the ‘hard’ sciences often don’t seem to get beyond Popper, while the whackier elements elsewhere in academe seem to leapfrog straight to Feyerabend and beyond.

Physics-envy really is a pretty unattractive condition.

Sociology was of course a science in the days before Human Subjects Review :)

Ha! Exactly. Actually, by Megan’s criteria, Dr Marvin Monroe is a paragon of science. Precise hhypotheses. Eminently falsifiable. And so on.

Hey, I have to defend my discipline. Some political scientists are more scientific than others. Personally, I mainly do public policy analysis, mainly national security stuff, which isn’t particularly scientific. I’ve done some quant stuff that is, but I’m not sure it’s not all crap.

Sociology can be very good, but usually when it’s interdisciplinary. Murray and Hernstein’s Bell Curve, for example, was superbly done methodologically. But most sociologists I’ve come across have been more interested in feel-good results than in real research.

No book that fails to talk about multicollinearity can possibly be superbly done methodologically…

But what I really wanted to say is that Steve Levitt cannot be a real economist because he has been described as rabidly antigun.

:-)

Brad DeLong

I can’t say I share the contempt for sociology as a discipline. Of course, maybe I’m biased since most of the sociologists I’ve met are (a) hot females, (b) fun to drink with, or© both. :-)

Christ if I’d seen that comment I would have gone off on one. The crack gang paper is the only thing I’ve ever heard about that Levitt did.

I need to write something about Popper (I need to write something at all …). Nine times out of ten, when a scientist says something stupid about anything, you can trace the problem back to Popper. Maybe we should have a Karl Popper Symposium or themed week or something.

Also, I think “sociology is crap” is one to put alongside “the French don’t do mathematical economics” as things that a surprising number of economists believe without ever having thought to check them.

What I really wonder is why economists think they are actually in the same league as chemists and biologists. In France economics is definitely a “science humaine” (and not a “science naturelle” or “science exacte”) and in Germany it is a “Geisteswissenschaft” (not a “Naturwissenschaft”). Just because economists like to tinker with mathematical models doesn’t free them of the reality that they are studying phenomenons that are almost exclusively all the result of human behavior – which remains a great mystery to science as we all know.

Correction of my previous post:

“What I really wonder is why some economists think that … ”

Economists think they are in the same league as the physicists because they tend to be quite a bit more rigorous. dsquared, for example, has demonstrated in casual blog posts that he knows more about statistics than some Nobel-winning physicists I have met. There are, of course, some physicists who know how to do it properly (experimental particle physicists tend to be extremely good), but the average level of statistical competence among physicists is quite a bit lower than among economists.

I’m agreed about Karl Popper being a menace, though. The AI and machine learning crowds have invented far more flexible and realistic formal models of induction. I am a particular fan of using Solomonoff universal induction as the idealized model of how science works.

What I find so surreal about those who confer upon one or more of the social sciences the label of “real science” (and it’s often not the social scientists themselves, but outsiders who wish to use their work to make political or policy claims with unchallengeable authority) is that the understanding of “real science” that is involved is usually absurdly ignorant about contemporary scientific practice in natural science.

The understanding of “science” that people shilling for the scientism of a particular social science is usually about 75-100 years old, a hybrid fusion of the Newtonian idea of physical laws and 20th Century positivism. But that’s NOT science as it is practiced in physics, biology or chemistry any longer, not at all. A lot of scientific work now relies on probability, on approximation, on “good enough” answers rather than absolute or precise answers. It works now with problems that are conceded to have no closed-form solution. The stuff I’ve been tinkering with recently on networks, emergent systems, and complexity is especially that way: a lot of what is interesting in that domain can only be observed or experienced, it cannot be “objectively” described. (That’s why Stephen Wolfram has all those pretty pictures in his book.)

Deirdre McCloskey has written a great little pamplet called The Secret Sins of Economics that gets at some of these points. The most important thing, she observes, is that economics cannot produce through “science” what might be its most important disciplinary insight, namely, that all of its scientistic rigor can with some accuracy and truth produce a fairly good picture of a given economic effect or pattern. It cannot tell you “scientifically” whether that effect matters. You can only do that (as in natural science) with persuasive, non-positivistic argument, drawing on ethics, philosophy, morality, politics, and even hermeneutics.

two minor comments:

1. I’ve just realised that sociologyphobia and Francophobia are almost certainly linked via Durkheim; Walras and Debreu can be swept under the rug, but there’s no getting over the fact that sociology was invented by a Frenchman. (Unfashionable bastard that I am, I find myself desperately wanting to link sociologyphobia, Francophobia and physics-envy via Adorno’s F-type personality).

2. Kieran; this seems like another good opportunity to plug Phil Mirowski’s book, n’est-ce pas?

After posting last night (a few comments up), it occurs to me that much of my (and I suspect others’) views on sociology as a discipline is a byproduct of the fragmentation of the social sciences generally. Upon reflection, there are a whole host of sociologists whose work I like and incorporate into my research (Charlie Moskos and the late Morris Janowitz most notably) and used to refer to what I taught (Weber and Etzioni foremost among them). For whatever reason, though, I never really think of them as sociologists since the work they do merges so seamlessly into political science.

“all you know is how that gang leader behaved when the sociology professor was in the room.”

All that high energy partical phyisicist knows is how the quark behaves when a physicist is in the room, too!

Aside from the obvious criticisms of ‘The Bell Curve’, using it as an example of how sociological work can be improved by interdisciplinary work is interesting. Herrnstein was a psychologist, IIRC; I’ve never encountere a sneerer as sociology who regarded psychology as any more rigorous.

It seems to me that there’s a problem with the academic idea of the word “economics” (though not necessarily with studying it as such). It’s just not a coherent subject in the same way that many of the ‘hard sciences’ are. One of my friends – a government student – once argued with me that ‘economics is either the study of everything or of nothing.’

Some research and teaching is closer to the ‘hard science,’ math-based end of the spectrum, while other parts are closer to the ‘social science’ end of the spectrum (and at the extreme, not always easily distinguishable from sociology). I took one microeconomics course that repeatedly alternated between both sides – mathematical concepts requiring advanced statistics and calculus at one end and signalling behavior at the other end – as well as plenty of concepts that were midway between the two – game theory and others.

Timothy: you’re criticism seems off-target. The idea of efficient markets, which is the holy grail of the economics-is-a-science crowd, is a very strong argument that the time series of a price should be a random walk.

dsquared: I think Mirowski’s proposed program has been overtaken by events. Namely, game theory has become an extremely hot topic among theoretical computer scientists. Even people doing pointy-headed stuff like type theory and logic are making use of its methods (google on “game semantics”). What makes it ironic is that it’s the people most comfortable with automata theory (the model checking crowd) who introduced these methods into CS in the first place! And the reasons are enlightening, too—to prove anything interesting about an automaton, you have to figure out all of the states it can get into and prove that it behaves correctly in all of them, and game theory can pretty much be used as a set of tools for doing exactly that.

The big flaming obvious problem that I saw with this is: what about the interdisciplinary people?

Specifically, what about Nobel Prize winning economist Gary Becker? He’s the University Professor of Economics and Sociology at the University of Chicago, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute.

Economics major. Took a sociology seminar with Donald Black (who formulated “law is used in inverse proportion to the closeness of the relationship”). Discovered that sociology, done well, is quite as good at describing human behavior (that is the goal of the social sciences, is it not? while describing non-human phenomena is the goal of the “hard” sciences) as economics.

Ummm… wouldn’t describe Gary Becker as interdisciplinary precisely. His vision of the social sciences is one in which political scientists, sociologists and other social scientists are data gathering worker drones for the economists, who do all the real theory. Much more real interdisciplinary stuff being done by the economic historians, who unlike many economists (Brad excepted – but he likes economic history too) actually have to grapple with complex and messy causal relations in the real world. Avner Greif at Stanford is a good example – I saw him deliver a keynote address at the International Society for the New Institutional Economics, where he told the audience that they all should go back and read Durkheim and Weber – this suggestion was not received with conspicuous enthusiasm by the gathered assembly.

=No book that fails to talk about multicollinearity can possibly be superbly done methodologically…

Brad, I think Kieran should come clean here. Isn’t Chuckles Murray just a paid tool of young, untenured sociologists who have him put out bad work that they can then publish refutations of and gain tenure. I don’t normally subscribe to conspiracy theories, but there is little else that can account for the man.

When Sowell goes after you….

But what I really wanted to say is that Steve Levitt cannot be a real economist because he has been described as rabidly antigun.

Speaking of multicollinearity, has Lott ever mentioned it? How well the two topics fit.

But even more amusing is Reynolds respect for Ayers and Donahue because he knows them. Somehow they aren’t hacks with an agenda, but everyone else is because of an anonymous source.

My whine about Reynolds take on Levitt and others including two St. Louis based academics is here:
http://www.blogstudio.com/SearchResults.jsp?Mode=G&Action=BL_Blog&Method=searchPosts&Subject=Introduction&Display=YES&Id=1035318354953000083334008558&OpenNew=NO&TargetMessageId=1051116082671

Henry,
I would argue a lot of economists are messing with messy relationships and a lot of it is going on in experimental economics as well as economic history and both groups are going back and reading Weber and Durkheim.

What strikes me about some of the economics is superior to all others talk, is that it seldom comes from the most interesting economists.

The sociology comment is a snotty anecdote, not meant to be a rigorous commentary on the field of sociology. I have any number of snotty anecdotes about the field of English Lit, and I almost went to grad school to become a lit professor.

You’re refuting the strong thesis—sociology is useless—rather than the weak thesis, which is that it isn’t scientific. The study may have been interesting, but I find it hard to classify the study as described—a single observer, one data point, non-reproducible—as science. That doesn’t mean it’s not immensely valuable. The thesis (again as described) was interesting and made sense to me. But it isn’t really testable, is it? Statistical studies do not, in and of themselves, make things scientific. Most sociology I’ve read, which is of course a very limited sample, does statistics on survey results, which I tend to think of as unreliable.

Some of the engineers on my thread got a little carried away, and I gave them what for in another post. But I don’t think I proclaimed that sociology is bad or worthless; simply that it hasn’t gotten to the point where it produces results that can be tested in any meaningful way. And I don’t think that I’m wrong, although I’m certainly open to correction on that point.

I don’t think any economists think that economics is a science like chemistry—or if they do, they’re crazy, which certainly isn’t out of the questin. But Brad DeLong is better qualified to comment on that. I think that with experimental economics, they hope to move towards that point, but I’ve never encountered anyone who thinks they’re there already.

If Jane Galt is the proclaimed liberal co-host of The Daily Rant, that person once described Clinton in comments on the site as “a serial rapist.” I’m inclined to suspicion of a person who combines those two positions.
If that isn’t this Jane Galt, then of course my remarks don’t apply to her.

==The study may have been interesting, but I find it hard to classify the study as described—a single observer, one data point, non-reproducible—as science.

Unfortunately, your complaints about the study don’t have much to do with the scientific process besides being reproducible. And the study is certainly reproducible, so I am confused as to what your consider the scientific process to be.

The scientific process requires one observe a phenomenon, create a hypothesis about it, create predictions of what one would observe that would confirm or falsify the hypothesis, test it and keep working until theory and data are consistent. We may report results from one particular test, but that isn’t the end of the process.
—-The thesis (again as described) was interesting and made sense to me. But it isn’t really testable, is it?

Why isn’t it testable? One identifies a series of features in the modern business, one then identifies a hypothesis about how one would identify those features in a street gang, one observes the street gang and from that tenatively confirms or falsifies the hypothesis.

And it certainly is reproducible. I have no idea why you think it is not. There is no magical force field stopping someone from carrying out the same process is there?

Contrary to the white lab coat stereotype, science, whether natural or social, is done with the same process. The method’s effectiveness differs by how well one is able to construct research design. Social processes are often more difficult to control for and so there is often a higher degree of uncertainty in the social sciences and even between them. This differing level of uncertainty is not unknown in natural sciences either. Meteorology suffers from many of the same problems that social sciences does.

Experimental economics uses the same basic scientific method as Venkatesh and Levitt. The difference is that in experimental economics is far easier to control for a variety of design issues. But the experimental nature also has its drawbacks as to whether it is externally valid.

I hate not being able to edit comments—damn grammar.

Lots of people talking…and happenned to cross a topic that’s been bumbling about in my head for a bit. Slightly off topic, but…

Where does one go for a reasonable critique of Popper, or perhaps some good post-Popper thought. I suppose I could look this up somewhere, but asking a bunch of well-informed folk seems a nicer solution.

As to the study of gangs-as-businesses, if the reference is to Sudhir Venkatesh’s work, it’s probably relevant that it relies not “just” on observation (and as an ethnographer I’d take exception to that characterization) but that additionally the drug dealer in question gave the researchers access to his extensive financial records.

From a quick read, the Megan McArdle post seems to suggest that disciplines that agree on first principles are more like a science than disciplines that do not. This strikes me as an odd criterion to define whether something is scientific, it just tells you that there is a dominant paradigm within a discipline. In one of her comments to the post she remarks:—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”.
Having a dominant paradigm may help develop cumulative knowledge. The problem of course is that you have nowhere to turn to in economic theory when your premises turn out to be false. This is why economists tend to get upset about (scientific) research like that of Tversky and Kahneman.

“The understanding of ‘science’ that people shilling for the scientism of a particular social science is usually about 75-100 years old, a hybrid fusion of the Newtonian idea of physical laws and 20th Century positivism. But that’s NOT science as it is practiced in physics, biology or chemistry any longer, not at all.”

I don’t think it ever was. Sure, moreso then than now. But my education in the history of science demonstrated to me that most conceptions of the actual activity of science are hopelessly idealized. Come to think of it, it seems to me that it was the cultural postivism of the late eighteenth century that probably invented an entire mythos about science that we’re still straddled with. Even many scientists still idealize science this way, although they surely know better on the basis of their own experience of it.

I’ve been talking with Megan in a thread on her site about her example of how supposedly Ptolemaic astronomy (of which I have considerable expertise, at least relatively) was merely descriptive, not sufficiently predictive, and “completely wrong”. In discussing this with her it’s become apparent to me that her view of science is quite naive.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t agree with the essential point of her controversial post — that economics is pretty rigorous in relative terms, and that the other social sciences could do better. But she’s overstating her case, and doing so in a dramatically rhetorical manner. Was it she who wrote about how these less disciplined fields value a good story over rigor? Hmm. She said something like this in her critcism of Mailer, and her net was implicitly cast much wider than him. If so, this very post of hers seems to me to be more an example of what she’s criticizing than it is of the proper way of doing things. That’s disapointing but certainly not unusual.

It’s completely coincidental that just yesterday I also tangled with a woman who ridiculed sociology and sociologists in Slate’s “Fray”. I know squat about sociology. Little enough that I wasn’t even aware of how many people hold it in very low esteem. Unfairly, it seems to me.

I’ll point people to Rittel and Weber’s articles on tame and wicked probelms for a discussion abotu why it’s so difficult (if not impossible) to do social science in a truly scientific way.

I blogged a bit about it a while ago:

“Tame” problems are those that can be modeled (represented in language, notation, or a simplified physical representation), repeated (they will consistently give the same response to the same inputs), and bound (defined entirely within a constrained space, such as a laboratory).

“Wicked” problems, on the other hand, meet none of those criteria. Rittel and Webber developed ten criteria to define wicked problems:

1. There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.
2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
3. Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but good-or-bad.
4. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.
5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a “one-shot operation”; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly.
6. Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.
7. Every wicked problem is essentially unique.
8. Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.
9. The existence of a discrepancy in representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem’s resolution.
10. The planner (designer) has no right to be wrong.

Problems in politics are almost certainly “wicked” problems, as defined here, and one of the reasons why we have so much trouble talking about politics … and why so much of the discussion on politics is inherently unsatisfying is that we persist in trying to make believe that they are tame problems.

I think ‘hatter’ asked about a good place to find out about critiques of Popper. I’m absolutely no expert, but I found Alan Chalmers ‘What is this thing called science?’ very useful as a general introduction to this kind of stuff, while W.H. Newton-Smith’s ‘The Structure of Science’ is a bit more demanding, but very good on Popper in particular.

she asserts engineers tend to be politically conservative and humanists socialist loons

This is the opposite of what Snow said in his Two Cultures essay.

Also for hatter, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a very good book, if you haven’t read it.

The basic test, the only test:

Can somebody else besides you do the experiment, or make the observation?

Can they demonstrate that you’re wrong?

Can they come up with new ‘unauthorized’ observations (such as Galileo refining the ‘looking glass’ to 1000:1 magnification), or Mendelian inheritance? Can they come up with ways of explaining the data that are politically incorrect?

Can they do all the above things and actually get your attention?

If the answer to all of the above is ‘yes’, it’s science; if not, it’s not.

Philosophy isn’t what matters. The ability to do some sort of experiment in the grubby physical universe and gore a sacred cow is what matters.

Some of the messaging in places on whether economics is a science seems to me to be missing the plot. 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.

Kieran,

Inspired by your post, I wrote a detailed description on my weblog of what makes something a science, and why if economics is a science, so is sociology, and vice versa.

If you’re interested, it’s http://waltpohl.org/

Walt – Early on in your piece about whether economics is a science – which I broadly liked – you write: “It doesn’t require any great insight to realize that that when prices go up, supply goes up and demand goes down,” which seems uncontentious but that is not so.

In an engaging paper of 1991, 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.

Even at this basic level we have a problem. Economists can offer an explanatory model to account for such observations but would find it generally impossible to predict ahead instances where the model could apply. At best they could specify the circumstances where it applies.

However, whether economics qualifies as a science or not is by the way. Governments, businesses, and people (especially successful stock market operators) inescapably model how markets function so it makes sense to extricate and analyse these models.

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:

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 great 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.

Bob:

I agree with you about the value of economics. We will be well-served if politicians knew more about economics before they plunged into boneheaded policies like the steel tariff. I was more interested in the philosophical question of what is a “science”. Economics can be “true” (and suitably interpreted, it is true) without being a science.

Walt,

I take that. There is a challenging substantive issue about whether any of the social sciences are “sciences” in the sense which physics is and I admire the persistence and acumen of those who continue to grapple with it. But that entirely valid general issue is also routinely invoked in public political debate to deflect criticism of live policy issues, some of which are boneheaded while others may amount to pandering to rent-seeking or pay-offs for sponsorship.

Models of social-cum-economic behaviour are implicit in virtually all public policy and that has been going on for a few millennia. It makes good sense to unpick the implicit models to see how far the components amount to testable theories, hypothetical constructions or bald assumptions and as to what criteria are being applied to determine why the new policy would lead to an “improvement”, and it what sense, over continuation of the status quo or the adoption of an alternative policy frame. Believe me, do the analysis with politically sensitive policies and the cry goes out that, “economics is not a science,” when the most likely motive for that is not some sudden revival of acute interest in the methodological under-pinning of economics but a political play to shut down embarrassing analysis. I have witnessed this scenario replayed many times and we need to recognise what is going on.

This is perhaps an opportune moment to 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)]

Bob: Agreed.

Walt – In case you and other readers here don’t know of it, there’s an excellent discussion of this territory in John Sutton: Marshall’s Tendencies – What can economists know?; MIT Press (2000)

For those interested in the methodologies of the social sciences and how they stack up against each other and against those of the hard sciences, the book to read is “How to Think Straight about Psychology” by Keith Stanovich.

Gee Mr Runnacles. Lakatos happens to be propagating ‘half-digested’ Popper himself. Ironical isn’t it?

Defending Sociology

Kieran Healy offers up a brilliant defense of sociology and the other “soft” social sciences against the attacks of economists….

I’m not a scientist

So says Jane Galt, anyway. Here’s what I posted in comments over there in response… I’m afraid I’ll have to…

Falsify THIS

Man, go out of town for a wedding, have a pleasant weekend, and come home to see the science wars…

Science in Action

People inclined to make sweeping judgments about the nature of the natural and social sciences based on a glancing acquaintance with the idea of falsification and a collection of popular books about quantum mechanics should read “‘Electron …

[...] doesn’t like me much in part because she’s has a long history of making an ass of herself on the topic of economics and its status as a social science. Again, just bear in mind that the [...]