I’m sure this wasn’t your intent, but this comes across to me like a situation where you’ve been having a high-level conversation about economics and then switch to asking the conomist to explain or justify the basic premises of the field to you.
The thing is, if you ask a physicist to answer a critical question you have about some fundamental thing in physics, he’ll likely be able to point you to the literature where your specific conundrum is resolved clearly and in great detail, or provide such an answer himself. I don’t know what would happen if you came up with an entirely novel question (I sure never did), but from what I’ve observed, I would expect that it would be met with genuine curiosity. Moreover, good introductory literature in physics often anticipates and preemptively answers many objections to the basic concepts that a smart critical student of the subject might come up with. Of course, if you’re being block-headed and impervious to arguments, that’s a different story, but that’s not what I’m talking about.
In contrast, in economics one rarely sees anything like this. The concepts are presented with an air of high authority, and various more or less straightforward questions about their validity that occur to me after some thinking are often left unaddressed. Mathematical models are typically discussed in a bizarre blinkered way that bears no resemblance to the ingenious modes of thought that I’ve learned to know and love from mathematicians and physicists. Even more maddeningly, one sometimes runs into literature written by prominent insiders in the field that points out such problems, but instead of provoking debate, these works are languishing in obscurity. There are many other bizarre things I’ve found in my amateur forays into the field, which could be the subject of a long essay.
Curiously, this is approximately opposite to the trend that Robin Hanson claimed to observe in popularizations. You’re not necessarily talking about exactly the same thing (Robin is talking about what the public prefers to read whereas you’re talking about how the professors react to questions) but it’s an interesting juxtaposition nevertheless. I don’t myself see quite the pure trend that Robin sees—I think plenty of economics popularizations lecture the reader from on high and I know several physics books that labor hard to explain and answer questions, but anyway, quoting Robin:
“Popular physics books, like Carroll’s, act easy and friendly, but still lecture from on high, sprinkled with reverent stories on the “human side” of the physics Gods who walk among us. They grasp for analogies to let mortals glimpse a shadow of the glory only physicists can see directly.”
“The recent popular econ book Superfreakanomics is also excellent, but very different in tone. Also easy and friendly, this is full of concrete stories about particular data patterns and what lessons you might draw from them, or you might not; hey it is always up to you the reader to judge. Such books avoid asking readers to believe anything abstract or counter-intuitive based on the author’s authority.”
So, according to Robin, physics books lecture from on high (based on the author’s authority) while economics books do not.
Meanwhile, your experience is that economists present their concepts with an air of high authority (based on the economist’s authority) while physicists do not.
I haven’t read any popular book on economics, but what you (and Hanson) say about physics popular books sounds right. That’s the reason I don’t like popular books on physics (I am a physicist). The presented ideas are counterintuitive, and, at the best, the counterintuitiveness is countered by some arbitrary loose analogy, which may be reinterpreted in a completely different way without much difficulties. What is worse, people seem to like exactly this obscure quality of such books.
(Once I had read a popular book by Landau and Kitajgorodskij and I really liked it, but it was about Newtonian mechanics mainly, and I think it included several equations. A book about cosmology, quantum physics or even string theory without any equation at all—save the ever popular E=mc² - can hardly convey any meaningful information.)
Very well said, Vladimir_M—a comment I wish I could vote up twice.
That basically agrees with my experience (mentioned in the discussion you linked) that economists lack a Level 2 understanding of their speciality. That is, they cannot trace the inferential paths they rely on, all the way back to the layman level. In my estimation, this leads them to advocate truly absurd policies, since this poor understanding prevents them from identifying where a model no longer outputs policies justifiable through such an inferential path.
For example, they equate growing GDP with a good economy. And as a general rule, that’s a good measure. But you have to know where the rule breaks down, and this requires a deeper understanding than most economists have. A Level-2 economist would say something like,
“Yes, GDP generally correlates with good economic health, but in the wake of this hurricane, most of that spending is just rebuilding destroyed stuff. Now, it’s certainly better to rebuild, given the hurricane, but this is just restoring the previous level of economic health—the high GDP numbers you see can’t be taken to mean that the economy was somehow improved, in any sense that we care about, as a result of the hurricane striking.”
But we never hear anything like that.
As another example, the consensus seems to be that we have to make sub-zero interest rates to clumsy banks that just revealed themselves to be extremely incompetent, without asking whether those banks are actually satisfying genuine consumer desires better than such desires would be satisfied without such a policy.
In contrast, physicists can say, “Why do we make that assumption? Well, because you have to account for these observations, and most of that work is done by these models, which leaves you with …” That’s tracing back to the layman level, and so a Level 2 understanding. If they’re reluctant to do so, then yes, it could be a (less common) Level 1 physicist, but more likely, it’s because they realize it will take a long time to trace out the inferential path.
Unfortunately, high schools don’t show students this path very well, which I’m finding out as I “relearn” the basis of physics from some books I’ve been reading that specifically discuss how these models in physics were discovered (like Atom by Asimov).
That basically agrees with my experience (mentioned in the discussion you linked) that economists lack a Level 2 understanding of their speciality. That is, they cannot trace the inferential paths they rely on, all the way back to the layman level.
Yes, that’s a very good remark. This summarizes my frustration with economic concepts very well.
Then you may be interested in this exchange I’m having with John Salvatier, a follower of Scott Sumner, a mainstream monetary economist (MME) who really aggravates me by how he advocates those stupid monetary policies I mentioned, and his (Sumner’s) very transparent lack of a Level 2 understanding. (This is touched on in my exchange with John, in which he agrees that Sumner’s model [though perhaps not his general understanding] would not be able to give the right recommendations in cases where nominal GDP drops for good reasons, but rather, would slavishly try to force it back up, steamrolling over good efficiencies.)
Unlike the popular MMEs, John is able to take the time to cross the (enormous) inferential distance between our positions on economic policy.
That clarifies sufficiently for me to work from the assumption that your interpretation is correct; thank you.
I think your earlier comment invoked an instinct of mine that when someone says “I was in such-and-such social situation, and the other person was doing it wrong!” they have often not examined the possibility of having made an error themselves. That doesn’t seem to be the case in this instance, but I don’t regret having checked. :)
Relsqui:
The thing is, if you ask a physicist to answer a critical question you have about some fundamental thing in physics, he’ll likely be able to point you to the literature where your specific conundrum is resolved clearly and in great detail, or provide such an answer himself. I don’t know what would happen if you came up with an entirely novel question (I sure never did), but from what I’ve observed, I would expect that it would be met with genuine curiosity. Moreover, good introductory literature in physics often anticipates and preemptively answers many objections to the basic concepts that a smart critical student of the subject might come up with. Of course, if you’re being block-headed and impervious to arguments, that’s a different story, but that’s not what I’m talking about.
In contrast, in economics one rarely sees anything like this. The concepts are presented with an air of high authority, and various more or less straightforward questions about their validity that occur to me after some thinking are often left unaddressed. Mathematical models are typically discussed in a bizarre blinkered way that bears no resemblance to the ingenious modes of thought that I’ve learned to know and love from mathematicians and physicists. Even more maddeningly, one sometimes runs into literature written by prominent insiders in the field that points out such problems, but instead of provoking debate, these works are languishing in obscurity. There are many other bizarre things I’ve found in my amateur forays into the field, which could be the subject of a long essay.
Curiously, this is approximately opposite to the trend that Robin Hanson claimed to observe in popularizations. You’re not necessarily talking about exactly the same thing (Robin is talking about what the public prefers to read whereas you’re talking about how the professors react to questions) but it’s an interesting juxtaposition nevertheless. I don’t myself see quite the pure trend that Robin sees—I think plenty of economics popularizations lecture the reader from on high and I know several physics books that labor hard to explain and answer questions, but anyway, quoting Robin:
“Popular physics books, like Carroll’s, act easy and friendly, but still lecture from on high, sprinkled with reverent stories on the “human side” of the physics Gods who walk among us. They grasp for analogies to let mortals glimpse a shadow of the glory only physicists can see directly.”
“The recent popular econ book Superfreakanomics is also excellent, but very different in tone. Also easy and friendly, this is full of concrete stories about particular data patterns and what lessons you might draw from them, or you might not; hey it is always up to you the reader to judge. Such books avoid asking readers to believe anything abstract or counter-intuitive based on the author’s authority.”
So, according to Robin, physics books lecture from on high (based on the author’s authority) while economics books do not.
Meanwhile, your experience is that economists present their concepts with an air of high authority (based on the economist’s authority) while physicists do not.
I haven’t read any popular book on economics, but what you (and Hanson) say about physics popular books sounds right. That’s the reason I don’t like popular books on physics (I am a physicist). The presented ideas are counterintuitive, and, at the best, the counterintuitiveness is countered by some arbitrary loose analogy, which may be reinterpreted in a completely different way without much difficulties. What is worse, people seem to like exactly this obscure quality of such books.
(Once I had read a popular book by Landau and Kitajgorodskij and I really liked it, but it was about Newtonian mechanics mainly, and I think it included several equations. A book about cosmology, quantum physics or even string theory without any equation at all—save the ever popular E=mc² - can hardly convey any meaningful information.)
Very well said, Vladimir_M—a comment I wish I could vote up twice.
That basically agrees with my experience (mentioned in the discussion you linked) that economists lack a Level 2 understanding of their speciality. That is, they cannot trace the inferential paths they rely on, all the way back to the layman level. In my estimation, this leads them to advocate truly absurd policies, since this poor understanding prevents them from identifying where a model no longer outputs policies justifiable through such an inferential path.
For example, they equate growing GDP with a good economy. And as a general rule, that’s a good measure. But you have to know where the rule breaks down, and this requires a deeper understanding than most economists have. A Level-2 economist would say something like,
“Yes, GDP generally correlates with good economic health, but in the wake of this hurricane, most of that spending is just rebuilding destroyed stuff. Now, it’s certainly better to rebuild, given the hurricane, but this is just restoring the previous level of economic health—the high GDP numbers you see can’t be taken to mean that the economy was somehow improved, in any sense that we care about, as a result of the hurricane striking.”
But we never hear anything like that.
As another example, the consensus seems to be that we have to make sub-zero interest rates to clumsy banks that just revealed themselves to be extremely incompetent, without asking whether those banks are actually satisfying genuine consumer desires better than such desires would be satisfied without such a policy.
In contrast, physicists can say, “Why do we make that assumption? Well, because you have to account for these observations, and most of that work is done by these models, which leaves you with …” That’s tracing back to the layman level, and so a Level 2 understanding. If they’re reluctant to do so, then yes, it could be a (less common) Level 1 physicist, but more likely, it’s because they realize it will take a long time to trace out the inferential path.
Unfortunately, high schools don’t show students this path very well, which I’m finding out as I “relearn” the basis of physics from some books I’ve been reading that specifically discuss how these models in physics were discovered (like Atom by Asimov).
SilasBarta:
Yes, that’s a very good remark. This summarizes my frustration with economic concepts very well.
Then you may be interested in this exchange I’m having with John Salvatier, a follower of Scott Sumner, a mainstream monetary economist (MME) who really aggravates me by how he advocates those stupid monetary policies I mentioned, and his (Sumner’s) very transparent lack of a Level 2 understanding. (This is touched on in my exchange with John, in which he agrees that Sumner’s model [though perhaps not his general understanding] would not be able to give the right recommendations in cases where nominal GDP drops for good reasons, but rather, would slavishly try to force it back up, steamrolling over good efficiencies.)
Unlike the popular MMEs, John is able to take the time to cross the (enormous) inferential distance between our positions on economic policy.
That clarifies sufficiently for me to work from the assumption that your interpretation is correct; thank you.
I think your earlier comment invoked an instinct of mine that when someone says “I was in such-and-such social situation, and the other person was doing it wrong!” they have often not examined the possibility of having made an error themselves. That doesn’t seem to be the case in this instance, but I don’t regret having checked. :)