fantapolitica
humorous look at Italian politics (bilingual)Friday, April 22, 2005
Ciampi, has to try to find a candidate prime minister who can win the support of parliament. Since the current majority has all declared their continued confidence in Berlusconi, it would take willful blindness not to see that Berlusconi is the one.
Hmmm willful blindness. There has been a lot of that around here in the past 4 years. The majority has refused to see the clearly proven guilt of some if it's more criminal leaders. For years they neglected to act on the Constitutional courts declaration that the current TV duopoly is an unconstitutional limitation on freedom of expression, then acted by reinforcing it in response to the courts complaints (also by the way expropriating frequencies the right to broadcast over which the highest administrative court had concluded belong to someone else but which are and will be used by mdiaset/Berlusconi). They have reformed every law violated by Berlusconi so that his actions are no longer crimes or so that the statute of limitations has run out.
My current political fantasy is that Ciampi dara pane per focaccia (will play tit for tat) and pretend not to notice that Berlusconi has the support of a parliamentary majority. Won't happen, but I am enjoying the idea. He will announce his decision today, so I have to type fast.
update: Well it was a fun fantasy while it lasted. Of course Ciampi asked Berlusconi to attempt to form a government.
Thursday, April 21, 2005
I am reading Neither Dismal nor a Science
I teach economics for a living, so I had better try to learn how. I consider Angelica's suggestions
1. Economics is not like the other sciences. Acknowledge that.
There is no giant econ lab where we can hold all other variables constant and vary the money supply or tax rate and see what happens. This is very troubling for students whose previous paradigm in studying science has been deeply rooted in the scientific method. By necessity, the study of economics often have to work backwards from real-world occurances, occurances so mired in culture, history and politics that it's often difficult just to deduce what factors are significant. Wasn't there a quote by Keynes to the effect that you don't need to be a great mathematician, historian, philosopher etc. to be an economist, but you need to be a little bit of everything? Why not embrace this need for all kinds of intellectual skills instead of retreating into the kind of defensiveness I hear so much of: "Yuh-huh! We are soooo a science. Like physics. And biology. Just as good. Look, we use graphs and shit."
I think this is a very good point. Students take economics classes because they think the economy is important. They don't expect economics to be like physics. For one thing most of them don't even take physics classes. Economists do tie themselves into mathalicious knots trying to impress malicious physicists. I would just note 3 things.
First natural science can be very successful even when experiments are impossible. The first quantitative science was astronomy (and that was originally waaay closer to astrology than economics is, since the original interest in predicting where the planets are was to facilitate the writing of horoscopes).
Second, not all of natural science is mathalicious. Molecular biologists do not use math much. The sort of biological research which awes, impresses and terrifies the world does nto involve fancy math. People recognise this as valid successful science, yet economists' image of science remains based on the (maybe even more successful) efforts of physicists. Fancy math is not useful in all research in natural science. This mildly supports the point that adding math does not guarantee that a social science will succeed to the same amazing degree as natural sciences have.
Finally there are natural experiments in economics. I think it is a good idea to talk about them in intro classes, because they have to do with policy (so are interesting) and real people and because they are important in economic research.
2. Always think to yourself: Would this sound crazy to the proverbial man-on-the-street?
When it comes to going forward in economic theory, logical inference is often the tool we use instead of experimentation. We make broad stroke assumptions such as "each individual will act to maximize his utility" or "if the price is driven down to zero, demand is infinite" not because we are intellectually lazy, but because making those assumptions allow us to simplify a real-life situation the point where we can apply logic. If x, then y. Never forget that an assumption that might seem basic and uncontroversial to an economist can actually be deeply counterintuitive and frankly absurd to a student. Demand can be infinite? But I only need one bicycle, even if they're giving them away! Profits always driven down to zero? So why does anybody ever bother to sell anything?
Imagine a theoretical physics class in which you are told to memorize the twin paradox and be prepared to regurgitate a schematic drawing of Schroedinger's Cat's without being walked through exactly how those counterintuitive outcomes came about? It's what Econ students are being told to do every day -- to accept what's in front of them at face value and memorize which little square to color in as the consumer surplus. Is it no wonder that students who are intelligent often wind up insulted rather than educated?
hmm phyiscs again. Also physicists can't get their head around Shrodinger's cat. Quantum mechanics is not just counter intuitive. It seems to be logically inconsistant. No one would or should accept it if it were not for the overwhelming evidence (the apparently impossible claims are often descriptions of actual experimental results).
The point is very very good. Economists have come to accept simplifying assumptions which are very implausible. I think the solution is to stress that they are made for clarity and to just say which are needed for the basic conclusions and which are needed just to keep the math easy. For example, the assumption that as price goes to zero demand must go to infinity (or be positive) is not needed for the standard results of general equilibrium theory. It is also crazy, since the demand for garbage is negative at price zero. Perfect competition can be explained as a limit case of low entry costs making it explicit that it is like the ideal gas law (ooops well that's chemistry not physics). I think honesty requires the teacher to admit that market efficiency results really depend on perfect competition. Also I think even an introductory course should consider imperfect competition, so the prof can promise to get to that later.
Optimizing is tough case -- it is central to economic theory and no one believes it is literally true (except this guy I met in Milan once named Adriano). I think it is clear that it is too demanding of students to teach boundedly rational models and irrational (behavioral) models too. Also I am not sure they are ready for prime time. Maybe a lecture or two on irrational speculative bubbles (Marshall believed in them) with the explanation that there's a lot more where that came from.
3. Separate the normative from the positive
It is notoriously hard to keep one's politics out of one's economics. But it is important to strive to be as objective as possible because when ideology trumps reality, economics becomes as dangerous as a faulty chart of a rocky shoal. It is doubly important that teachers try their best to separate what they think should be from what is because they are going to be introducing economics to students of a variety of political backgrounds.
Even without being a big lefty, I was alienated from the first day of my econ class because it was declared that the argument in economics was over, and the Marxists lost. That apart from a few leftist holdouts like Umass (insert rolling eyeballs) all economic departments across the country agree on this stuff. I know what my profs were trying to do -- cram in the basics of economics in one short semester. No time for the whys and wherefores. But students dislike being force-fed conclusions without hearing the arguments. And we especially dislike the feeling that we're imbibing an ideological stance rather than knowledge. I'm not saying my profs were trying to indoctrinate us. I'm saying that in their attempt to fill our heads with their ideas as expeditiously as possible, they're not working to convince their students of the legitimacy of those ideas beyond saying "trust me on this one."
Here I think the prof made a big mistake. For one thing, basic micro theory is being challenged by, you know, that guy who won the nobel prize, and two Clarke medalists in a row and stuff. Also while Marx has few defenders, none of the above has many. I really don't see why a professor would make claims for the field that put students off and which are not really shared by researchers. I have avoided this mistake (to put it mildly). I spend a lot of time teaching about theories which I think are false (and say so). This often gets on students' nerves. I suppose there must be a middle way.
"3a. A corollary: Problem sets are not a good place for editorializing"
another good point.
4. Economics is all around us
The way economics is taught is very compartmentized. You have yer micro and you have yer macro and it can appear that this stuff only applies to firms making widgets and perfect markets which never fail to find equilibrium. Instead, I think economics would be much more compelling if professors really hammer home its most fundamental definition -- the study of the distribution of scarce resources. You pay 28 extra cents for a box of brand-name flakes rather than generic after seeing $500,000 worth of commercials. That's economics. Your parents were able to buy the house they always wanted after interest rates dropped below 6%. That's economics too. This is why I am so psyched about Freakonomics -- it's economics as a tool that cuts away the noise and reveal the fascinating underlying patterns in everyday life rather than the abstract and rarified realm of widgets.
I think I understand this and very much agree. I think that econoomics would be less off putting if profs started with facts as in stories about things that really happened and asked why. Sometimes, the answer is very simple to an economis (sad to say the case I was thinking of was rent control).
I totally agree with point 5 and this post is waaaaaaay to long.
