(MENAFN- ValueWalk) Morton Schapiro and Gary Saul Morson of Northwestern University disucss why economists should embrace other disciplines.
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When economists are trying to understand the economics of growth, they usually go by the numbers. Yet, not only don't the numbers always add up, they also lack the dimension and context needed to solve some of the world's most perplexing problems. That is the view of Morton Schapiro, an economist who is also president of Northwestern University, and Gary Saul Morson, a professor of Slavic languages and literature there. In this interview, they make the case for a broader perspective as presented in their book, Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn From The Humanities. The authors argue that economists need to consider culture, art, history and a host of other disciplines when formulating economic policy, in this radio show interview on . (Listen to the full podcast using the player above.)
by Gary Saul Morson, Morton Schapiro
Following is an edited transcript of the conversation.
: What is the idea behind this book?
Morton Schapiro: Saul and I teach an undergraduate course on the different disciplines and what they can learn from each other. It really came out of this course we've now taught seven years in a row. We got this idea about what economics could learn from the humanities, specifically from literature, but even more broadly from other humanistic fields and even the qualitative social sciences: sociology, anthropology, history and the like.
Saul Morson: We had the idea that different disciplines don't just deal with different subject matter, they see the world differently. Their whole vision of people is different. And very often, they don't understand each other to the point where each one not only doesn't accept the other one's beliefs, but can't really believe the other believes what they say they believe. I was amazed that economists actually think people always behave according to their best self-interests, that you can mathematicize human behavior, that culture is irrelevant. They can't really believe this, can they? By the same token, economists have trouble believing what humanists sometimes believe. That gave a lot of energy to the class as we tried to discuss each other's questions in our own framework.
: What has been the impact of not incorporating the humanities into economics?
Schapiro: I love teaching and publishing and economics. I have a day job in administration, but nothing makes me prouder than to be a professor of economics. I've been doing it almost four decades now. But our field, while we look outside of economics for topics, we don't really engage with the literatures of other fields.
'We're not comfortable with things that we can't put into an equation, and I think we lose a lot because of that.' –Morton Schapiro
There was a recent survey of U.S. professors at different colleges and universities, and they broke them down by field and asked them the following simple question: Is it better to stay to your own field, or is a multidisciplinary approach potentially more productive? And 79% of psychology professors said it's better to go outside your field. A total of 73% of sociology professors and 68% of history professors agreed. But only 42% of economics professors said that you should go outside your field.
We've come across other studies that looked at how often people in specific disciplines cite people outside their discipline and, no surprise once again, it was very rare for economists to cite anyone outside the field of economics. So, there's a lot we leave on the table. It's a great field, but it could be so much better if we were less insular.
Morson: You sometimes get the impression that economists think all these other fields are peopled by muddled-headed professors who can ask good questions but haven't a clue what a rigorous, systemic answer is. So, let them provide the questions and we'll provide all the answers. It's a kind of idea that they have achieved a hard science modeled on Newtonian mechanics whereas everybody else is just sort of muddling along. But nothing in actual predictive behavior suggests that they have achieved such a hard science.
: Are economists just so focused on the numbers and data points that they don't even consider going outside of that as an option?
Schapiro: That's a very good point. I think they're also geared to a mathematical approach. I do applied econometrics, so I have nothing against math and statistics, but it's very hard to put in things like culture. How do you put that into a mathematical formula? You tend to come up with behavioral models that are quite often the foundation for predictive models, and they tend to be very naïve in terms of real true human behavior.
You would think that we would engage more with the field of psychology if you're talking about behavioral models, but the literature is pretty clear about that. We don't. A lot of economists work on the cycle of poverty, yet how often do they cite anyone in sociology or anthropology? I have friends who work on voting behavior, but are they really engaged with the literature and political science? A number of people work on the distant past, but do they truly try to integrate the understanding from historians? The answer tends to be no. I think it's partly a focus on numbers. But part of it is, we're not trained that way. We're not comfortable with things that we can't put into an equation, and I think we lose a lot because of that.
: What has a love for literature done for you as an economics professor?
Schapiro: Well, I think it's made me a lot more humble. Saul and I both tell stories about how we began to think that we could have a productive dialogue, that maybe we could contribute, in a small way as we try to in this book, between the humanities and economics.
When I think about it, I've never really been primarily an economist who works in the developing world, although I did some of this particularly early in my career. I tell this story of working in Africa as a consultant for the World Bank and what I missed by not truly understanding the countries in which I worked.
There's enormous literature about the good things and bad things from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the like. In certain continents, development economics has a pretty good story. But where I was working in sub-Saharan Africa, the story isn't all that good. I think if we really engaged with an understanding of the history, the politics, the religion, the sociology of the family, rather than just tried to get the prices right and applied the same sort of basic economic model towards successful development, the policies would have been a lot more effective.
Morson: You need to be
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