Tag Archives: economics

Men’s studies

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I’ve zipped through Myra Strober’s [amazon_link id=”B01CRU4QV4″ target=”_blank” ]Sharing the Work[/amazon_link], propelled both by enjoying this memoir of a life as an academic economist and by righteous anger. (In fact, I’m posting this review 3 weeks too early on the tide of this sentiment.*)

Professor Strober embarked on her career in the late 1960s, and was therefore one of the pioneering feminists to whom my generation owes so much. The book starts with her initial experience at Berkeley, being told by the department chairman that she will never get tenure – ostensibly because she lives in Palo Alto, in reality because she has children. The shock of realising the truth on her drive home across the Bay Bridge launches her into a commitment to feminism in general and to tackling the sexism of economics and the academic world in particular.

[amazon_image id=”B01CRU4QV4″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Sharing the Work: What My Family and Career Taught Me about Breaking Through (and Holding the Door Open for Others)[/amazon_image]

This is not an angry, polemical book at all. It’s a warm and readable memoir about family and friends as well as career and the politics of gender. Professor Strober grew up in Brooklyn in a loving family, and was the first to go to college and graduate school. She tells of the tensions of moving away from that background, and also the tensions in her marriage to an ambitious medical student and researcher – a marriage which eventually ended in divorce. Athough not at all bitter in the telling, the book is a reminder of how hard it was for a woman to combine career and children. (It still is – just think about the relatively small proportion of prominent women who have children.)

Thanks in part to the battles fought by earlier cohorts of women, the sexism we face in the workplace today is as nothing compared to those early days of the struggle for recognition. But the anger reading this book kicked in when I reflected on the continuing male dominance of economics in particular – our proportion of women being closer to computer science and mathematics than to any other social or natural science. Just as I finished reading [amazon_link id=”B01CRU4QV4″ target=”_blank” ]Sharing the Work[/amazon_link] I happened upon this reflection on getting tenure written by Ellen Meara. Nor is this a US issue – it’s as true in the UK and EU. Economics has a women problem – as Justin Wolfers and Noah Smith among others have noted – and that means economics has a problem. A subject done by men about men can’t claim to be either social or a science.

There is, I think, some recognition of the problem in the economics establishment, and some well-meaning efforts to address it. However, these efforts do not yet extend to a wide acknowledgement of some fundamental points – above all that there is something wrong with the (mainly male) insiders’ definition of what makes for ‘good’ economics.

At the end of last year I sent a survey to about 30 teachers of economics in high schools, asking what they thought were the main barriers to girls choosing to study economics at university; for although the total number of people doing economics degrees has been rising in the UK, the proportion who are female has been declining. The single most popular reply was that it was the ‘character of the subject’. I recounted this to a highly sympathetic and non-sexist male colleague. “Well,” he replied, “It’s not clear to me that there’s anything to be done about this.” That’s the problem. If the trend continues, we’re going to have to rename economics ‘men’s studies’.

I admire Professor Strober for spending her career actively doing something about it. This is a book to inspire all female economists and give all male economists pause for thought. [amazon_link id=”0262034387″ target=”_blank” ]Pre-order it [/amazon_link] now!

* It’s 22 April for the Kindle edition – the hardback will be out in mid-May.

Economics and evolutionary science

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I recommend this Evonomics post about economics post-2008, and the kind of re-evaluation that’s been going on among economists, citing somewhat critically Noah Smith and also Dani Rodrik’s excellent [amazon_link id=”0393246418″ target=”_blank” ]Economics Rules[/amazon_link]. Author David Sloan Wilson complains: “All good, but there is something missing from the internet links that I just provided—any discussion of evolutionary theory.”

[amazon_image id=”0393246418″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science[/amazon_image]

I couldn’t resist preening a little, for my 2007/2010 book [amazon_link id=”B004XCFI2Q” target=”_blank” ]The Soulful Science: What Economists Really Do and Why It Matters[/amazon_link], has a whole chapter, Murderous Apes and Entrepreneurs, about the importance of the links between economics and evolutionary biology. This also forms one strand of my 2012 Tanner Lectures. In other words, I wholly agree with the argument of the Evonomics post, but thhink there has been a little bit more progress than it acknowledges.

Of course, formal evolutionary theorising is not part of the conventional economics mainstream, although it has some distinguished practitioners; but having said that informally it widely informs much business economics. There are also some leading economists who have been thinking about the overlap between economics and evolution. The ‘murderous apes’ of the chapter title was inspired by Paul Seabright’s brilliant [amazon_link id=”0691146462″ target=”_blank” ]The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life[/amazon_link]; Wilson cites Robert Frank’s [amazon_link id=”0691156689″ target=”_blank” ]The Darwin Economy[/amazon_link]. There is also an active strand of research on complexity theory, which [amazon_link id=”0571197264″ target=”_blank” ]Paul Ormerod[/amazon_link] and [amazon_link id=”0415568552″ target=”_blank” ]Alan Kirman[/amazon_link] among others have written about.

[amazon_image id=”B004XCFI2Q” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Soulful Science: What Economists Really Do and Why It Matters[/amazon_image] [amazon_image id=”0691146462″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life[/amazon_image] [amazon_image id=”B008W4ASGC” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good[/amazon_image]

Economics will have to be consistent with what we learn about human behaviour and decisions from other human sciences, not just the other social sciences, but also evolutionary biology, cognitive science and psychology.

Non-rational economic man

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This past couple of days I’ve been attending the IDEI/Toulouse School of Economics digital economics conference, where the Suzanne Scotchmer Memorial Lecture was given by Joshua Gans.

Josh has a new book out soon (March), definitely one to look forward to, The Disruption Dilemma. The blurb says: “Almost twenty years ago Clayton Christensen popularized the term in his book [amazon_link id=”142219602X” target=”_blank” ]The Innovator’s Dilemma[/amazon_link], writing of disruption as a set of risks that established firms face. Since then, few have closely examined his account. Gans does so in this book. He looks at companies that have proven resilient and those that have fallen, and explains why some companies have successfully managed disruption — Fujifilm and Canon, for example — and why some like Blockbuster and Encyclopedia Britannica have not. Departing from the conventional wisdom, Gans identifies two kinds of disruption: demand-side, when successful firms focus on their main customers and underestimate market entrants with innovations that target niche demands; and supply-side, when firms focused on developing existing competencies become incapable of developing new ones.”

[amazon_image id=”0262034484″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Disruption Dilemma[/amazon_image]

However, his lecture was on his paper on the market for scholarly attribution, which interprets the assignment of co-authorship between senior and junior scientific researchers in terms of a signalling model. It was very interesting and perhaps sheds some light on the growing trend toward larger numbers of co-authors on science papers. The day afterwards, Justin Wolfers wrote in the New York Times about a new paper by Heather Sarsons showing among other results that women get zero credit for papers on which they are listed by co-authors (unless the others are also women). While this is a finding that will not surprise any female academics, it’s also kind of shocking to see the empirical results so starkly. No doubt Josh will blog about the gap between the rational world of his model and the non-rationality of male economists.

The rhetoric of economics, ctd.

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From [amazon_link id=”0521094461″ target=”_blank” ]Theoretical Welfare Economics[/amazon_link] by J De V Graaff: “On the one hand, it could be argued that the term ‘real national income’ is a mere definition, devoid of normative significance. … On the other hand, it could be objected that ‘the real national income’ is an emotive expression; and to say it has increased in to imply that the state of affairs thus described is approved or is in some sense thought to be good or desirable.”

He argues – and I wholeheartedly agree – that we should use the terminology as people normally understand it, with its normative connotation, and not like economists insisting that all that [amazon_link id=”0691169853″ target=”_blank” ]GDP[/amazon_link] measures is what it is defined to include.

[amazon_image id=”0521094461″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Theoretical Welfare Economics[/amazon_image]

Thinking about welfare economics – or not

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I’ve been reading I.M.D.Little’s [amazon_link id=”0198281196″ target=”_blank” ]Critique of Welfare Economics[/amazon_link] (1950 originally – I have Andrew Sentance’s slight musty, rescued from his garage, 1973 paperback). He wrote: “There can be no significance in national-income comparisons unless a value judgement about changes in distribution is presupposed. But statisticians … do not, of course, wish to make any such presupposition.” He continues that they can tell us that the market value of consumption goods has increased, but cannot conclude that consumption has increased. “There is, after all, no such thing as consumption, the size of which can be measured.”

[amazon_image id=”0198281196″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]A Critique of Welfare Economics[/amazon_image]

Winging its way to me now, courtesy of a recommendation by Martin Wolf, is [amazon_link id=”0521094461″ target=”_blank” ]Theoretical Welfare Economics[/amazon_link] by J de V Graaff (1957), which one contemporary review described as “an elegantly executed demolition of ordinary welfare theory.” I don’t need a lot of persuading about the demolition-worthiness of the theory but it does leave rather a huge question about (a) what we think we’re measuring with the national accounts and (b) what we think standard evaluations of public policy are telling us. The answer, of course, is that mostly we don’t think about it.

[amazon_image id=”0521094461″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Theoretical Welfare Economics[/amazon_image]