Scholars avoiding the policy world?
by Benjamin on April 25, 2009
It seems that fewer and fewer top people within academia on the international relations side of things want to go into policy making. The Washington Post (via Chris Blattman) article is an interesting read, but one paragraph in particular disturbed me:
Scholars are paying less attention to questions about how their work relates to the policy world, and in many departments a focus on policy can hurt one’s career. Advancement comes faster for those who develop mathematical models, new methodologies or theories expressed in jargon that is unintelligible to policymakers.
This sounds very much like a lot of the criticisms thrown at modern economics, and some have argued that the mathematization of the other social sciences is partly to blame on ‘economic imperialism’. It is our methods (preferably the out-dated or standard ones) which are absorbed by other social sciences who also want to be seen as more ‘scientific’ and thus feel they should be more mathematical. A very extreme belief is on display in Stanford’s Edward P. Lazear 1999 paper. This phenomena is often referred to as ‘physics envy’ after the very similar psychological ideas of Mr. Freud, and is re-capped well by Physicist (turned economist at Columbia) Emmanuel Derman in two pages, and it boils down to the fact that the moral philosophy of the 17th and 18th century, the political economy of the 19th and early 20th holds not a candle to the magnificent mathematical beauty of modern micro. Maths may be all good and well, but to me, the fact that micro and macro cannot be unified in maths (at least not yet, as macro has become micro) and that when the macroeconomists are needed, as and when a crisis rolls along, we throw the maths to the curb for some empirical models and some macroeconomic linkages.
As other disciplines adopt our maths, I can’t help but feel that we as a discipline have taken some of the scientific rigour out of the political scientists, international relations scholars and anthropologists who followed in our optimistic micro footsteps. McCloskey always reminds us, that “science” means a systematic enquiry about a given phenomenon. It is the systematic enquiry, be it through text, data, books, experience, experiment and even mathematics, which makes a science scientific – not its mathematical aspect. Now our obsession is keeping others away from the policy making world – much like many economists try to avoid large aspects of the real world – by moving our set of (skewed) academic values into their fields. Political Science rebelled against this move some years ago, but it doesn’t seem to have been enough.
Tags: Economic Imperialism, economist, policy, political science, statistical significance, washington post
Hey Ben, nice one. However, just came across this (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/324/5926/452-b) today, which is a report about work from these guys (http://www.complex-systems.meduniwien.ac.at/research.html). There’s some good in physics, I suppose, the point is just that the econs are stuck with wrong interpretations and “old physics” ;) ….
Oh it’s definitely ‘old physics’ – and there’s a lot of interest in the emerging ‘econophysics’ area which has some very cool ideas – I like the micro-to-macro work and the analogy of getting temperature by understanding the movement of atoms which together add up to a phenomena that is completely different to its constituent parts. I’d like to see more mathematical micro like that, what do you think?
Looking at the Complex Systems guys you mentioned, the science magazine abstract looks really interesting (do you have a copy by chance?), but the abstract I found on their website uses the ‘stress testing’ approach to see how ‘risky’ the banking system is, and I think that is one of the original problems… That might be an older paper though.