Monthly Archives: August 2022

Whose brain is it?

Posted on by

This weekend – despite having a small and demanding visitor – I polished off The Idea of the Brain: A History by Matthew Cobb. It has nothing to do with economics of course, but there are a number of things that resonated with me.

One was the way the Nobel-winning Cambridge brain scientist Edgar Adrian brought wartime experience of radio technology to thinking about how neurons respond to stimulus – and also how his commitment to public communication led him to “think about what nerves do in a rather different way from that expressed in his scientific papers. In hunting for terms that would help non-experts understand, “These concepts – messages, codes and information – now form the basis of our fundamental scientific ideas about how the brain works.” I’ve always been deeply committed to (a) explaining things clearly and in ways people can understand and (b) that you can’t explain something like this if you don’t properly understand it yourself.

There’s an interesting but brief discussion of the contrast between reductionist approaches to understanding the brain (which seems dominant) and others pointing to the emergence of complex phenomena from a few simple neural networks. I don’t know what to think of it in this context, but the path of reductionism hasn’t served economics all that well.

Then there’s an extraordinary story about an Australian patient who had an electrode implanted in her brain to manage her severe epilepsy. When she grew used to the device, it transformed her life: “With the device I felt like I could do anything …. nothing could stop me.” But the manufacturer went bust and the device had to be removed. The woman said: “I lost myself.” Horrific. How can the law and economic arrangements enable such a thing to happen? Cobb writes: “In a future world where companies are funding interfaces with our brains, we may lose control over our identity.” This goes to the heart of debates about health data as well, and the legal construct that allows data to be alienated as a piece of economic property. How can an electrode in a woman’s brain be corporate property? Well, in the way General Motors claims it still owns the car you bought because your car sends data back to GM. Watch out for ‘smart’ hip replacements or pacemakers….

Finally, another section that spoke to me points out that ‘The Brain Has a Body’ (the title of a 1997 article) and the body has an environment – “but neither the body nor the environment feature in modelling approaches that seek to understand the brain.” The input from the world is part of the system in which brains operate.

The book‘s history of thought approach is terrific, as is its linkage of technological  innovations (watches, computers, radio ….) with how scientists have thought about brains – I found this a really gripping and informative read.

81jc4udI7SL._AC_UY436_QL65_

 

Women and our economics problem

Posted on by

The Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession was established by the American Economic Association in 1971. Its first survey found that just 6.7% of faculty in US universities were women and more than two thirds of them were on the lowest rung of the profession. Gender and the Dismal Science: Women in the Early Years of the Economics Profession by Ann Mari May documents the route to that shameful situation. It is not surprising that in the late 19th and early 20th century women struggled to access higher education and academic jobs, but economics was distinctively sexist in sustaining 19th century practices into the 1970s.

The book uses archival material to document how this came about. Some of the factors were indeed common across disciplines, such as unwillingness to grant women access to PhD studies, or to hire or retain female members of staff who got married. As US universities professionalised, professional associations determined the boundaries of the discipline and regulated access to PhD programmes and the network of contacts these grew. Two aspects of economics seem distinctive, however.

One is the early dominance of professional journals by what are still referred to as the ‘top 5’, which were run by a remarkably concentrated group of men – in two cases, by individual top departments (Harvard and Chicago). This facilitated the rise to status of an old boys network – it still operates as reflected in long-serving editors disproportionately publishing papers by those they know – and the journals still have outsize influence on professional advancement.

The other is the fact that many early female members of the American Economic Association were associated with social reform movements. And of course the subject matter of economics has significant implications for job markets, monopoly power, migration and other politically-contentious issues. But the resolution of early intellectual conflicts within the AEA went against advocacy and in favour of “disciplinary boundaries that made clear the scientific nature of economics.” Campaigning was for sociology, or theology; economics would deal in facts. Female membership of the AEA didn’t climb above 5% from 1890 until 1928.

The situation has improved in the US – or rather, it did in the 1980s and 1990s – but economics remains a male-dominated field. Cognitive narrowness and a narrow range of experience matter for any subject but particularly for a social science with policy influence. May reports on a survey she and co-authors conducted finding that male and female economists in the US and Europe have systematically different views on some issues. It isn’t obvious, ahem, that male views are more correct. At least now both the AEA and the Royal Economic Society are self-aware, and some male colleagues are truly concerned about the continuing evidence of systematic bias. And of course it extends far beyond women to the even lesser representation of people of colour and people from low-income backgrounds.

The historical perspective in this book is an interesting supplement to the recent literature on this structural deformation of the economics profession – both the new empirical documentation of the scale and scope of the problem, and the history of thought approaches that emphasise the desire to be ‘scientific’ (often linked to logical positivism but evidently with roots back in the early days of universities and the emergence of disciplinary boundaries). The data May has assembled on the history of the US profession is a real trove. And the individual stories of injustice make one’s blood boil…

41smRqjrdtL._AC_UY436_QL65_

Fitting economics into a theory of justice?

Posted on by

I spent a relaxing week at the Welsh coast doing only light reading, but have a few posts to catch up on about books I read before the holidays – including a couple out in September, Brad Delong’s Slouching Towards Utopia and Jacob Soll’s Free Market: The History of an Idea. First up, though, some thoughts prompted by A Political Economy of Justice, a collection of essays edited by Danielle Allen, Yochai Benkler, Leah Downey, Rebecca Henderson and Josh Simons. That’s a wonderful line-up of editors, and the chapters emerged from a seminar series at Harvard. As with all essay collections, they are variable in quality and cover a wide range of subjects – from ‘Beyond GDP’ to theories of change in a democracy to the US ‘prison industrial complex’. Nevertheless, the book is well worth it for the introduction alone.

The intro makes the case for considering capitalism as a multi-level system whose economy is institutionally embedded, reflects power relations, depends on social norms and instantiates certain values. It thus argues that neoliberalism as an economic ideology ignores these contextual aspects, claiming an impossible universalism (although the book isn’t particularly interested in the varieties of capitalism literature). The editors also argue strongly for the discussion of social justice and the values of the capitalist economy to focus on the organization of production as well as – or rather than – the distribution of income and consumption. They want economic analysis to rediscover politics and to make explicit issues of justice such as race and gender, or corporate purpose and sustainability.

Individual chapters focus on specific issues and proposals – there’s a clear progressive slant to all, however. Interestingly, the editors note that one area on which they could not reach consensus was the question of effective freedom and property rights in a market economy: does ownership inevitably imply unequal power relations?

There’s also some discussion – interesting to me! – of the implications of economic measurement, the definitions and metrics particularly GDP, for social justice: “Contemporary theories of justice have given these questions little sustained attention.” The introduction takes it as a given that the specific aim of growth in GDP should not guide a fair society. The chapter on this issue (by Julie Rose) takes the perspective of a history of thought about idea of the stationary state, invoking Mill, Keynes and Rawls. It argues for an alternative aim: “To fairly and reliably expand people’s opportunities,” and paints GDP growth as a subsidiary aim. Fine as far as it goes, but not actionable – although I must say I’d expected a traditional ‘degrowth’ argument and was relieved to find Rose doesn’t fall in to that trap. Although an analysis of the argument from a social justice perspective would be telling. Throughout, the book assumes the inadequacy of GDP growth but is vague about alternative metrics, while clearly sympathetic to the capabilities approach.

This and much more. While the focus on institutional specifics is welcome, it means the book is almost wholly US-focused. There’s also an inevitable tension between acknowledging the specificities of time and place and articulating a reasonably universal theoretical framework. The book goes heavily for “historically grounded explanations” involving “socialized or embedded individuals”, and with power and conflict central to economic relations. “There is no Archimedean point on which to perch microfoundational agents….” I tend to agree that economic analysis needs far more history, social relations and politics – but take it too far and ‘political economy’ loses the economics part.

61HsvVA+g1L._AC_UY436_QL65_