I note that the Freakonomics folks are doubling down, giving Nathan Myhrvold (the controversial advocate of geo-engineering solutions to climate change that they leaned on too heavily in the final chapter of their book) a platform to defend his contributions and De Long lets Nicholas Weaver reply to the technical points of Myhrvold’s post. However, without boring down into the details one can’t help noticing that Levitt and Dubner start by talking up his credentials (the ‘polymath’s polymath’), that they and he lament the uncivil tone of the debate, before Myhrvold proceeds to rip into his critics for being uncivil, irrational and territorial!
Levitt is a prize-winning economist and many of their critics are paying tribute to his and Dubner’s excellent work. As Weaver and others are saying, by digging in like this, they are making things worse, much worse. But Levitt has form here with his ad hominem reply to Noam Scheiber’s essay on the original Freakonomics, which was quite baseless as Schreiber made clear.
Scheiber’s essay was a riveting dissection of the forces at play in economics and the modern academy. Every field of study goes through phases where it tries to achieve the gold standard of physics in providing a clear narrative of demonstrable progress in knowledge, rigorously based on logic and empiricism, and this pressure is profoundly corrupting. It has given us Hume’s and Kant’s nonsense—all the more potent for coming from brilliant intellects—and we are still trapped in the mire of ethical confusion that is their legacy (see here for an outline).
Scheiber’s explanation of the clean-identification movement and the problems it led to was a compelling parable elegantly told, neatly complemented by Heckman’s critique, that the harmoniousness of a set up that allowed theorists to work on their elegant macro models while clean-identification economists crunched the data on amenable problems was just too convenient. While Levitt attacked Schreiber for not being initiated into the club he really should be very grateful, for often the sharp outsiders can provide the most interesting critiques, but it must be offerred as a critique, not as a delete-all-and-replace handing down of the law. This is really the great mistake that Levitt and Dubner have made in one-sidedly relying on their polymath’s polymath–it really showed enormous contempt for the field of climate science, a huge, complicated field in flux. In many ways it reinforces Schreiber and Heckman’s warning about the impatience with and disdain for complexity. (For a similar reason, I appreciate John Horgan’s writing on science, with his special concern for the deleterious effect on ethics, again as a result of push to impose simplicity on reality.)
Like Schreiber, I use the term ‘Dismal Science’ with irony and affection. My top five bloggers could easily include economists or bloggers that write insightfully with an informed economic perspective (Cowen,De Long,Klein,Krugman,Yglesias). Economics becomes a ‘dismal science’ when its adherents succumb to laziness, and few fields offer so much temptation. Good economics is hard and its great practitioners get my respect and gratitude.
The Dismal Science and its Discontents
Levitt is a prize-winning economist and many of their critics are paying tribute to his and Dubner’s excellent work. As Weaver and others are saying, by digging in like this, they are making things worse, much worse. But Levitt has form here with his ad hominem reply to Noam Scheiber’s essay on the original Freakonomics, which was quite baseless as Schreiber made clear.
Scheiber’s essay was a riveting dissection of the forces at play in economics and the modern academy. Every field of study goes through phases where it tries to achieve the gold standard of physics in providing a clear narrative of demonstrable progress in knowledge, rigorously based on logic and empiricism, and this pressure is profoundly corrupting. It has given us Hume’s and Kant’s nonsense—all the more potent for coming from brilliant intellects—and we are still trapped in the mire of ethical confusion that is their legacy (see here for an outline).
Scheiber’s explanation of the clean-identification movement and the problems it led to was a compelling parable elegantly told, neatly complemented by Heckman’s critique, that the harmoniousness of a set up that allowed theorists to work on their elegant macro models while clean-identification economists crunched the data on amenable problems was just too convenient. While Levitt attacked Schreiber for not being initiated into the club he really should be very grateful, for often the sharp outsiders can provide the most interesting critiques, but it must be offerred as a critique, not as a delete-all-and-replace handing down of the law. This is really the great mistake that Levitt and Dubner have made in one-sidedly relying on their polymath’s polymath–it really showed enormous contempt for the field of climate science, a huge, complicated field in flux. In many ways it reinforces Schreiber and Heckman’s warning about the impatience with and disdain for complexity. (For a similar reason, I appreciate John Horgan’s writing on science, with his special concern for the deleterious effect on ethics, again as a result of push to impose simplicity on reality.)
Like Schreiber, I use the term ‘Dismal Science’ with irony and affection. My top five bloggers could easily include economists or bloggers that write insightfully with an informed economic perspective (Cowen,De Long,Klein,Krugman,Yglesias). Economics becomes a ‘dismal science’ when its adherents succumb to laziness, and few fields offer so much temptation. Good economics is hard and its great practitioners get my respect and gratitude.