Wow, so much to think about!

You probably saw that I reacted poorly to Paul Ehrlich's Cultural Evolution. There are many reasons why, all of which I don't seem to be able to coherently say. What I reacted to quite unfavorably was the apparent notion that all the academic study of culture hadn't matured because the academics don't understand how science is done. I find Ehrlich's application of science in this example very shoddy, and apparently none of his colleagues bothered to tell him so. If such prominent scientists are so loose with their methods the advancement of science is retarded.

I think there is benefit in scholars attempting to talk across disciplines. That conversation is impeded when the everyday tinkering within scientific disciplines is taken to be science. One of the saving graces of economics is there is still plenty of debate at the theoretical level.

I'm sort of odd--okay you knew that--so I always scroll through the comments when I read a economics blog post. It seems a handy ways to get at least a familiarity with the various perspectives. Over time some more or less jaded points of view become obvious, so I get a sense for the "sides" more broadly in the discipline.

Last month Dani Rodrik posted The Economist evaluates the randomized evaluators. Rodrik made the point:

The trouble is that the moment you take the experiment from Western Kenya and want to use it to inform policy in another setting, you need to make all kind of additional, not rigorously tested assumptions (about how similar or dissimilar the settings are and how these affect the likely outcomes). By the time the evidence is used, it has become as "soft" as many other kinds of evidence that development economists traditionally rely on.

One of the commenters seemed to think Rodrik is against randomized trials. That's hardly the case. Rodrik is encouraging scholars to be careful in their work. Timbuktu Chronicles links to an article by Duncan Green Power v poverty. Green basically argues that for development to work the politics has to be right; an idea not too far removed from George Ayittey's point of view. In that article Dani Rodrik came up:

Harvard economist Dani Rodrik found that democracies produce more predictable long-run growth rates, greater short-term stability and more equality, and are better able to handle economic shocks.

One of the commenters on Green's piece has the handle "antileft." There are trolls online. Antileft in this instance at least doesn't seem a troll but someone whose views are rigid enough so to provide the outlines of a more general line of reasoning. I hardly would paint Rodrik as a leftist, but surely he is viewed so by many. What worries me is that what gets missed is genuine intellectual concerns, not particularly political ones in Rodrik's views. Loyalty has it place, and good scholarship often comes down to a dogged commitment to see a particular set of ideas through. Communists and Jesuits make good scholars. Still there is always a role for professors to remind us, and more especially students of the discipline, to take care in such thing as minding ones priors.

The edition of Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture has a neat feature: There is the original Introduction by Franz Boaz, a Preface by Margaret Mead and a Forward by Mary Catherine Bateson. Boaz was Benedict's teacher and colleague, Bendict was a friend and mentor to Mead, and Bateson Mead's daughter. The book itself might be said to be "old fashioned" or "outdated." It is, for example the culture and personality has been generally abandoned in anthropology. Yet the book is still in print 75 years after first being published. I think Ehrilich would have been wise to read the first chapter "The Science of Custom."

Jim Culleny puts up poetry at 3Quarks Daily. Today's poem by Gwee Li Sui seemed relevant and I want to share it.

A Chinese Parable ~Gwee Li Sui

Said the Premier: For a lifetime I have sought only the common good and with bare hands wrought a kingdom, whose vast wealth now stands testified by pagodas, innumerable, sundried as the blades of grass – a permanent fortune locked from the barbarians of the warring dune by the joining of walls. So long as we strive, we shall enjoy our fruits; and he will survive who works on diligently – for Work is Life. God gave them the hands, I have given them tools; and none starves in this kingdom except the fools. Our magistrates are just and good law is praised. Our governors are wise and the stores are raised. Here are the foundations for millennial peace! Is there more a people will desire than these?

Said the Mandarin: There is nothing lacking in the provision of the body, seeing our middle kingdom bodily strong, sinewy-- but there is more to Kingdom and Man than Body. When a people clutch all gods as money gods, you must be vigilant. Pieties are not rods to fish material things; they form a World-Soul to which one gives assent and he is whole who lives in fellowship: this, too, is your goal. Great cultures are not hewn from a heritage for sons, but for great-great-grandsons of due age. Some investments then must always seem pointless, a fling into the well, but there's some goodness to be less than pragmatic. No work is ample and no wall strong if you should slight the temple.

Culleny also put a quotation from Leonard Cohen before the post:

I've seen the nations rise and fall / I've heard their stories, heard them all /but love's the only engine of survival --Leonard Cohen

The second part of Gwee Li Sui's piece is as good a definition of culture I've seen. And the juxtaposition of the Cohen quote made me smile and think of you. One way or another I think both of us believe, "but love's the only engine of survival." So much so that surely economics as a discipline cannot continue to ignore something so important.