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Cents and Sensibility
What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities
By Gary Saul Morson, Morton Schapiro PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-17668-0
CHAPTER 1
Spotting the Spoof
The Value of Telling Stories Out of (and in) School
This book creates a dialogue between two fields that rarely have anything to say to each other: economics and the humanities. We mean to show how that dialogue could be conducted and why it has a great deal to contribute.
The best dialogues take place when each interlocutor speaks from her best self, without pretending to be something she is not. In their recent book Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception, Nobel Prize–winning economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller expand the standard definition of "phishing." In their usage, it goes beyond committing fraud on the Internet to indicate something older and more general: "getting people to do things that are in the interest of the phisherman" rather than their own. In much the same spirit, we would like to expand the meaning of another recent computer term, "spoofing," which normally means impersonating someone else's email name and address to deceive the recipient — a friend or family member of the person whose name is stolen — into doing something no one would do at the behest of a stranger. Spoofing in our usage also means something more general: pretending to represent one discipline or school when actually acting according to the norms of another. Like phishing, spoofing is meant to deceive, and so it is always useful to spot the spoof.
Students who take an English course under the impression they will be taught literature, and wind up being given lessons in politics that a political scientist would scoff at or in sociology that would mystify a sociologist, are being spoofed. Other forms of the humanities — or dehumanities, as we prefer to call them — spoof various scientific disciplines, from computer science to evolutionary biology and neurology. The longer the spoof deceives, the more disillusioned the student will be with what she takes to be the "humanities."
By the same token, when economists pretend to solve problems in ethics, culture, and social values in purely economic terms, they are spoofing other disciplines, although in this case the people most readily deceived are the economists themselves. We will examine various ways in which this happens and how, understandably enough, it earns economists a bad name among those who spot the spoof.
But many do not spot it. Gary Becker won a Nobel Prize largely for extending economics to the furthest reaches of human behavior, and the best-selling Freakonomics series popularizes this approach. What seems to many an economist to be a sincere effort to reach out to other disciplines strikes many practitioners of those fields as nothing short of imperialism, since economists expropriate topics rather than treat existing literatures and methods with the respect they deserve. Too often the economic approach to interdisciplinary work is that other fields have the questions and economics has the answers.
As with the dehumanities, these efforts are not valueless. There is, after all, an economic aspect to many activities, including those we don't usually think of in economic terms. People make choices about many things, and the rational choice model presumed by economists can help us understand how they do so, at least when they behave rationally — and even the worst curmudgeon acknowledges that people are sometimes rational! We have never seen anyone deliberately get into a longer line at a bank.
Even regarding ethics, economic models can help in one way, by indicating what is the most efficient allocation of resources. To be sure, one can question the usual economic definition of efficiency — in terms of maximizing the "economic surplus" — and one can question the establishment of goals in purely economic terms, but regardless of which goals one chooses, it pays to choose an efficient way, one that expends the least resources, to reach them. Wasting resources is never a good thing to do, because the resources wasted could have been put to some ethical purpose. The problem is that efficiency does not exhaust ethical questions, and the economic aspect of many problems is not the most important one. By pretending to solve ethical questions, economists wind up spoofing philosophers, theologians, and other ethicists. Economic rationality is indeed part of human nature, but by no means all of it.
For the rest of human nature, we need the humanities (and the humanistic social sciences). In our view, numerous aspects of life are best understood in terms of a dialogue between economics and the humanities — not the spoofs, but real economics and real humanities.
Twin Crises
Economics and the humanities are both in trouble, though not for the same reason.
Economists wield a lot of power and take a lot of criticism. Sometimes it even seems as if they have two functions: to formulate policies and to take the blame when things go wrong. Should a stimulus fail to stimulate, or very high interest rates prove powerless to dampen inflation, economists are often quick to explain away the facts while newspapers are even readier to skewer them. When a real estate bubble bursts, journalists eagerly point to the economic theory that bubbles are not supposed to exist at all. For many in the public, the face of economics has turned out to be MIT economist Jonathan Gruber telling his colleagues that the health care law was deliberately written "in a tortured way" so that, given "the stupidity of the American voter," its core provisions would be invisible. For others, it is Paul Krugman responding to his failed predictions regarding the timing of the US recovery from the last recession, the future of the eurozone, and the onset of deflation by declaring that he has seldom, if ever, been wrong.
Economists can always tweak their models to account for what has already happened. Their critics, in turn, have the easy job of not taking any risks at all, just looking for inevitable mistakes. As Alexander Pope wrote three centuries ago, it is always easy to poke holes in someone else's paper.
And you my Critics! in the chequered shade, Admire new light through holes yourselves have made.
Can nothing be done? Over the past few decades, economists and social psychologists have announced the supposedly startling discovery that, contrary to economic theory, people do not always behave rationally! They are not mechanisms for optimizing, their choices are not always consistent, and theyoften do not act according to their best interests. Inside economics, the result has been heated controversy, but from an outside perspective, it has been wonder. Surely no one in his right mind ever thought people are rational to begin with? Why, the whole heritage of Western literature has described people as irrational, and the social sciences point to many factors other than reason that shape behavior. Why would philosophers since Socrates have been urging people to act rationally, if they always did so anyway? And why would intellectual historians have spent so much time describing how the very idea of rationality in the modern Western sense arose in the first place? And then there is everyday life, where surely no one was ever moved to reflect on the absence of folly!
With this discovery in mind, traditional rational choice theory has generated, like yin answering yang, an irrational choice theory. Behavioral economics, as this flourishing movement is called, has in its own turn generated new policies and new critics. It purports to come closer to adding the human dimension to economic models, but as we will show, although it has made some advances, it does nothing of the kind. The human beings it imagines behave just as mechanically, only less efficiently (judged by the same criteria as traditional economists use). They are still abstract monads shaped by no particular culture. You still don't need stories to understand them. In short, they bear as much resemblance to real people as stick figures do to the heroines of George Eliot or Leo Tolstoy.
Adding the human dimension to economics in this and similar ways is like deciding that we need air as well as food and so prescribing a diet of airy food. (Dairy Queen, anyone?) Might there be a better way to integrate humanistic insights? But here we come to another problem: the state of the humanities.
The Dehumanities
Go to almost any issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, consult recent issues of national publications from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times, read reports from Harvard University and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and you will discover that the humanities are in crisis. No one seems to value them anymore. Enrollments in humanities courses plummet, and majors in humanistic disciplines diminish. If it were not for the recent phenomenon of double majoring — fulfilling requirements in two disciplines as a sort of employment insurance — figures for humanistic disciplines would doubtless look still worse.
Like a delicatessen owner who sells rancid meat and then blames his business failure on the vulgarization of customer taste, humanities professors account for their plight by faulting their students. "All they care about is money." "Twitter has reduced their attention span to that of a pithed frog." Critics of literature professors respond that for at least a quarter century, they have themselves argued that there is no such thing as great literature but only things called great literature because hegemonic forces of oppression have mystified us into believing in objective greatness. If this idea was once bravura, it is now just boring. The most commonly taught anthology among literature professors, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, paraphrases a key tenet of the dominant movement called "cultural studies": "Literary texts, like other artworks, are neither more nor less important than any other cultural artifact or practice. Keeping the emphasis on how cultural meanings are produced, circulated, and consumed, the investigator will focus on art or literature insofar as such works connect with broader social factors, not because they possess some intrinsic interest or special aesthetic values." Weshall have more to say about this passage later, but it is worth noting that cultural studies did not invent, but adapted, an already established orthodoxy denying any sort of intrinsic literary value. If Shakespeare and Milton are no more important than any other "cultural artifact or practice," and if they are to be studied only "insofar as" they connect with other social factors and not because of "some intrinsic interest or special aesthetic values," then why invest the considerable effort to read them at all? Reading Paradise Lost is not like strolling through a field! Could it be that students don't take literature courses because they are responding rationally to what their teachers have been telling them?
The language about "how cultural meanings are produced, circulated, and consumed" gropes for the prestige of something hard, unsentimental, materialistic — in short, for economics, as a literature professor might imagine it. It appears that humanists' key strategy for saving their disciplines has been to dehumanize them. And so we have a host of new movements, announced with the breathless enthusiasm appropriate for discovering the double helix. Sociobiological criticism has shown us how emotions and behaviors described in literary works arose to serve an evolutionary purpose. What's more, you can now recognize why you love Dante (or Danielle Steele) by turning to neuroaesthetics. And at the Modern Language Conference of 2009 it was discovered that "the next big thing" was the digital humanities. Before anyone else thinks of it, we hereby coin the term, and claim to have founded the discipline of, "the nano-humanities." We don't yet know what this cutting-edge criticism will do, but we are sure that it will not involve real engagement with major literary works or a deep appreciation of what makes them great.
Each of these dehumanities offers something of value. Undoubtedly, the digital humanists have contributed to making good texts available and easy to comment on. It is interesting to learn how the human capacity to make and appreciate art evolved, and it would be curious to know "what happens in the brain when we laugh at Mark Twain." For that matter, the economics of novel publishing could be informative, and so could the chemistry of papermaking, the physics of bookbinding, and the physiology of reading poems aloud. But each of these contributions would matter only if we already had an appreciation of great art and literature, which you can't get by deaestheticizing, de-literizing, or dehumanizing them.
Humanomics
All attempts to overcome the dualism of cognition and life, of thought and singular concrete reality from inside theoretical cognition are absolutely hopeless ... like trying to lift oneself up by one's own hair. — Mikhail Bakhtin
Rather than attempt to save the humanities by dehumanizing them, why not see what great literature genuinely has to offer other disciplines? We have written this book to illustrate one way this can be done.
We believe that economics can benefit by considering key ways of thinking, cultivated by reading great cultural artifacts. To anticipate our conclusions, let us say that economics could benefit from understanding people better. We have three distinct ways the humanities could help in economic thinking.
First, people are not organisms that are made and then dipped in some culture, like Achilles in the river Styx. They are cultural from the outset. A person before culture is not a person at all. This idea of a person before culture resembles a Zen koan, like the sound of one hand clapping. To be sure, economists are not the only thinkers who typically treat culture as an add-on rather than as essential — some political philosophy does the same. But whether we are speaking of mainstream economics or (as we shall see) behavioral economics, the temptation of claims aspiring to universality, and of models reducible to equations, makes the idea of acultural humanness especially appealing.
Second, to understand people one must tell stories about them. There is no way to grasp most of what individuals and groups do by deductive logic. Understanding Robespierre or the French Revolution is not at all like proving the Pythagorean theorem or calculating the orbit of Mars. Human lives do not just unfold in a purely predictable fashion the way Mars orbits the sun. Contingency, idiosyncrasy, and choices — all of which allow for alternatives — play an indispensable role. That is why, as the great novelists recognized, personhood and sociality demand biography and history. Novels are a distinct way of knowing; and the very shape of the stories they tell — what sorts of events are represented as plausible, effective, or important — conveys vital, if elusive, information.
Third, economics inevitably involves ethical questions, not reducible to economics itself or, for that matter, to any other social science. Economists often smuggle ethical concerns into their models with concepts like "fair market price" in which unacknowledged ethical questions are treated as unavoidable givens. As we shall see, there are many ways to make these covert issues overt and argue about them explicitly. And as several recent thinkers have pointed out, these questions can be addressed in terms of different ethical theories.
As we conceive them, these questions often invite a distinct perspective best learned from the great realist novels. The works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Edith Wharton, Henry James, and other great psychological realists share a sense that ethical questions are often too complex and too important to be safely handed over to any theory, existing or to come. It requires real, but ultimately unformalizable, sensitivity and the ability to express what is sensitively perceived. As we explain in chapter six, this distinctly literary and novelistic approach to ethics may itself be regarded as a sort of theory, of course, and if one does so one can find theorists, like the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, who have endeavored to articulate it. But it is not a theory in the sense of a comprehensive system somehow extracted from the great novels that one can learn apart from reading them. That is because the very experience of reading these works is part of what one has to have in order to think ethically in the novelistic way.
As novels understand ethical decisions, they require good judgment, which, by definition, cannot be reduced to any theory or set of rules. Sometimes familiarity with multiple theories — ethical pluralism, as Jonathan Wight has persuasively argued — helps. Such pluralism above all inculcates a sense of modesty about the ability of theoretical reasoning to address the most important questions. As Stephen Toulmin, whose favorite book was Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, has argued, good moral judgment is a matter not of theoretical reasoning (what Aristotle calls episteme) but of practical reasoning (phronesis), which comes from sensitive reflection on a great deal of experience and close attention to the unforeseeable and unrepeatable particularities of many individual cases. As we shall see in chapters 6 and 7, Toulmin regards his call for this sort of thinking as a summons to revive the tradition of casuistry, that is, case-based reasoning, shorn of the abuses to which casuistry was often put. And as both Toulmin and G. A. Starr have argued, the realist novel developed from casuistry by offering particularly rich cases for ethical reflection.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Cents and Sensibility by Gary Saul Morson, Morton Schapiro. Copyright © 2017 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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