“Congress is so strange,” a Russian immigrant once observed. “A man gets up and says nothing. Nobody listens. Then everybody stands up and disagrees.”
Amusing. The quote is from Buchholz’s New Ideas from Dead Economists, which I’m still(!) laboring away at.
I’m still reading New Ideas from Dead Economists by Todd Buchholz (progressing slowly; see Living Among the Dead). Although I haven’t seen much to the promising new ideas yet, Buchholz give a great, historical account of the development of economics.
The father of Economics was, as every economist know, Adam Smith, at least if we are talking about economics as its own, scientific disipline (and we are!). Adam Smith was from Scotland. Given that and Brittain’s position as world leader (in politics, trade, military, you name it), it comes as no surprise that all the early, great economists were British. They were also all rather close; this is how Buchholz begins the chapter on John Stuart Mill:
Almost all renowed British economists since Adam Smith have been linked through close friendships. Remeber that Smith’s good friend David Hume was a “godfather” to Thoms Malthus, who was an intimate friend with David Ricardo, whose comrade James Mill encouraged his economics. James begot John Stuart Mill. A slight break occurs since Mill did not befriend his successor Alfred Marshall. But Marshall learned from Mill’s works (and from the economist F.Y. Edgeworth, nephew or Ricardo’s friend Maria Edgeworth) and then thaught Keynes, who dominated British economics until World War II and produced numerous prominent disciples [p. 91].*
No surprise, perhaps, that the early development of a new field has a geographical structure, so to speak; after all, they had to learn from each other and compete for the same, few positions. Anyway, that it was a hegemony is beyond doubt:
In 1848, Mill published his chief work on economics, Principles of Political Economy. For decades it dominated the book market like monopolies Mill discussed within its pages. Oxford relied on the Principles until 1919, probably because its successor was written by Marshall, a Cambridge man. Indeed, the works of all the great economists illuminate long paths. [Here it comes:] From 1776 to 1976, just five books regined over economics in nearly unbroken succession: Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Ricardo’s Principles, Mill’s Principles, Marshall’s Principles, and Samuelson’s Economics. What they lack in imaginative titles, they make up in endurance [p. 102].
Looks like I just got five new books on my ‘buy and read’ list. Perhaps a tall order, but 200 years of economics, almost 90% of its history, in just five books sounds rather cheap. (But how many volumes?)
* New Ideas from Dead Economists, Revised Edition, Todd G. Buchholz, 1999, Penguine Books.
Earlier this year, experts gathered at the hub of the universe (which is Harvard, it seems) to suggest and debate the big, unsolved problems in the social sciences, economics between them. From a press release:
Initiated and funded by the non-profit Indira Foundation, this effort was inspired by David Hilbert, who challenged the world to solve 23 fundamental mathematical problems in 1900. Since then, mathematicians have solved 10 of the now-famous ‘Hilbert Problems’, creating new fields of knowledge along the way.
“Hilbert made two powerful observations,” said Nicholas Nash, a member of the Indira Foundation. “First, having important, unsolved problems is essential to the vitality of a discipline. And, as important, by identifying those problems, we can inspire future generations to solve them.”
Taleb was there, not surprisingly, and suggested the ‘Black Swan problem’:
How can we be robust against “Black Swans”; that is, how can we (1) identify domains where these consequential rare events play a large role (these are too rare for any statistical models track them properly), and (2) instead of predicting Black Swans, build systems and societies that can resist their shocks.
King suggested the problem of international institutions:
What is the relationship between strong international institutions and international cooperation? Do strong international institutions lead to or result from international cooperation?
King also suggested a methodological problem:
A major methodological problem is how to avoid (or ameliorate) post-treatment bias in big social science questions. Post-treatment bias occurs when the causal ordering among predictors is ambiguous or wrong or when, in an attempt to control for confounding variables, one controls away a consequential variable.
It is hard and frustrating to work on a revision and a letter to the referee, in general, but particularly when the editorial board finds it hard to decide whether to ask for a revision or that the paper is not suited for their journal.
In weak moments, I see the value and purpose of the peer-review process the way it currently works in economics and most other scientific disiplines today. They are, however, weak moments. What comes out of the peer-review process? Usually a long list of minor issues which, for the general finding, has no real importance. Sometimes, of course, major flaws are pointed out. Ultimately, peer-review (is supposed to) guarantee quality and relevance.
How would the world be like without the process? Crazy, perhaps? Would it be a world where one could not trust the written word, and where quality, relevance, and importance were without meaning? Of course not. Instead, every journal would have an open-source, continually ongoing review process, where the responsibility for quality and relevance was placed solely with the author and the editorial board; where poor work would be openly critisized in responses and comments; where authors could focus more on developing ideas and writing skills (instead of excuses, irrelevant details, and cover-up operations); and where authors would be forced to think harder about problems before submission (and not during the revision). Scientists would perhaps write more monographs and fewer articles as the main difference (the peer-review process) ceased to exist, and as the monograph are better suited to report on many scientific findings. Citations would be a better measure of importance and influence; today, a good deal of the references are included on the whim of referees. Finally, perhaps it would dawn on us that knowledge evolve, and that to be knowledgable on a given subject requires familiarity with a whole literature, not only a handful of articles from the leading journals.
Keynes once wrote that the ‘master economist’ must fulfill an extraordinary set of attributes:
He must be a mathematician, historian, statesman, [and] philosopher [...] He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man’s nature or his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood; as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near the earth as a politician.*
* The quote is from an essay on Alfred Marshall.
A colleague recommended New Ideas from Dead Economists by Todd G. Buchholz. I just started it, and progress is as always rather slow, but I think I’m in for a fun read; the following paragraph from the Acknowledgements holds promise of the kind of dry humor probably characteristic of academics, but which I like nonetheless:
I want to apologize to those economists mentioned in this book who are living today. The title, New Ideas from Dead Economists, is not meant to refer to them, their personalities, or their public speaking abilities although I cannot be held responsible for resemblances. They should take comfort in the honor of being mentioned alongside Smith, Ricardo, Keynes, and others.
It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl.
- John von Neumann (1903-1957)
The standard Kalman filter and even the Extended Kalman filter (for nonlinear problems) proved inadequate. I’ve now placed my hope in what’s known as the Ensemble Kalman Filter:
Another sequential data assimilation method which has received a lot of attention is named the Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF). The method was originally proposed as a stochastic or Monte Carlo alternative to the deterministic [Extended Kalman filter] by Evensen (1994a). The EnKF was designed to resolve the two major problems related to the use of the [Extended Kalman filter] with nonlinear dynamics in large state spaces, i.e. the use of an approximate closure scheme and the huge computational requirements associated with the storage and forward integration of the error covariance matrix.
The EnKF gained popularity because of its simple conceptual formulation and relative ease of implementation, e.g. it requires no derivation of a tangent linear operator or adjoint equations and no integrations backward in time. Furthermore, the computational requirements are affordable and comparable to other popular sophisticated assimilation methods [...].*
* Excerpt from Geir Evensen’s Data Assimilation: The Ensemble Kalman Filter, 2007, p. 38.
I read Sylvia Nasar’s biography of John Nash, A Beautiful Mind (1998), which also has been made a movie. John Nash won the Nobel in economics in 1994, but is equally famous for his serious mental disorders which he recovered from in the early nineteen ninties. ‘B squared + RTF = 0′ is a ‘very personal’ equation Nash used, while he was ill, to describe his life when he was at MIT (see chapter 21, A Beautiful Mind). Of course, he used an equation to describe his life. ‘The equation represents a three-dimensional hyperspace, which has a singularity at the origin, in four-dimensional space. Nash is the singularity, the special point, and the other variables are people who affected him’ Sylvia Nasar writes about the equation. Sometimes, I recognize something of myself in the Nash Nasar describes, bar the genius, of course. I have not come to the point where I feel like describing my life with an equation, though, and if I do, it probably won’t be four-dimensional.
Nash did marvelous mathematical research at MIT, but he also lead a chaotic life. My life is quite marvelous most of the time; my research, however…
Part 2? Take Two, rather (This is Take One). It surprises me how difficult it is to get to grips with this book, particularly given its apparent brevity (the main body of the book runs through page 215 in a relative small format). Of course, I’m not even an amateur philosopher of science, but still.
A part of the difficult lies in the chaotic or at least hidden structure of the book. Fuller announces his motives in the introduction (‘to recapture the full range of issues that separate [Kuhn and Popper],’ see p. 3*). The ‘full range’ is presumably a lot of material; the already mentioned brevity is thus surprising. But Fuller do not list nor declear the ‘issues’ he wants to address. There seem to be no plan or structure. Rather, he seems to move from issue to issue in a haphazard fasion, and the motive or aim of the discussion is often out of sight and elusive. The conclusion of the book is also something of an anti-climax. The last chapter seemingly only discusses one of the issues separating Kuhn and Popper; there are no final remarks, no conclusion, or anything that resembles a closure.
Kuhn vs. Popper did increase my understanding and knowledge of the ideas of both Kuhn and Popper, and also how their ideas connect to the ideas of other important thinkers. Perhaps more importantly, Fuller has helped me see the important differences between Kuhn and Popper. Throughout the book, for one thing, Fuller comes up with comparative statements.
Kuhn and Popper represent two radically different ways of specifying the ends of inquiry: What drives our understanding of reality? Where is the truth to be found? [p. 56].
Kuhn was indeed authoritarian and Popper liertarian in their attitudes to science. This point has been largely lost, if not inverted, by those who regard ‘Kuhn vs Popper’ as a landmark in 20th-century philosophy of science [p. 13]
Popper was a democrat concerned with science as a form of dynamic inquiry and Kuhn an élitist focused on science as a stabilising social practice. Nevertheless, they normally appear with these qualities in reverese. How can this be? [p. 68].
To dig deeper into these differences, one has to dig into the actual ideas. Kuhn first:
For Kuhn, science begins in earnest with the adoption of a ‘paradigm’, which means both an exemplary piece of research and the blueprint it provides for future research [...] Kuhn deliberately selects the phrase ‘puzzle-solving’ (as in crossword puzzles) over ‘problem-solving’ to underscore the constrained nature of normal science [...] A ‘revolution’ occurs [upon a 'crisis'] when a viable alternative paradigm has been found. The revolution is relatively quick and irreversible. In practice, this means that an intergenerational shift occurs [pp. 19-20].
An important aspect of Kuhn’s philosophy of science is how history is rewritten after a scientific revolution, such that the scientific development appears streamlined and meaningful. In Kuhn’s view, Fuller writes,
[...] the secret of science’s success – its principled pursuit of paradigmatic puzzles – would be underminded if scientists had the professional historian’s demythologised sense of their history. After all, in the great scheme of things, most actual scientific work turns out to be inconsequential or indeterminately consequential [p. 20].
Another important feature of Kuhn’s ideas regards how people become scientists. One becomes a scientist through a “conversion experience or ‘Gestalt switch,’ whereby one comes to see the world in a systematically different way” (p. 21). These features, combined with the conservative flavor of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, led Popperians to liken Kuhn to ‘religious and politcal indoctrinators’ (p. 21).
But of course, this was not how Structure was read by most of its admirers – if they actually did read the book. For while Kuhn’s examples are drawn almost exclusively from the physical sciences, these are the disciplines that have probably paid the ‘least’ attention to Structure, even though Kuhn himself was qualified only in physics. Kuhn’s admirers are to be found instead in the humanities and the social and biological sciences [p. 21].
Kuhn’s admirers persisted in wrenching Structure from its original context and treating it as an all-purpose manual for converting one’s lowly discipline into a full-fledged science. These wishful readings of Structure have been helped by its readers’ innocence of any alternative accounts of the history of science – often including their own – with which to compare Kuhn’s [p. 22].
When Fuller turns to discuss Popper, his sympathies with Popper become obvious:
[Popper] was always a ‘philosopher’ in the grand sense, for whom science happened to be an apt vehicle for articulating his general world-view [pp. 22-23].
For the ‘grand philosopher,’ philosophy of science is only a reflection of more fundamental attitudes:
Once Popper’s philosophy of science is read alongside his political philosophy, it becomes clear that scientific inquiry and democratic politics are meant to be alternative expressions of what Popper called ‘the open society’ [p. 26].
Popper grew up intellectually among the positivists in the Vienna Circle, but disagreed with them on their attitude towards the role of logical deduction.
For the positivists, deduciton demonstrates the coherence of a body of thought, specifically by showing how more general knowledge claims explain less general ones, each of which provide some degree of confirmation for the more general ones. For Popperians, deduction is mainly a tool for compelling scientists to thest th econesequences fo their general knowledge claims in particular cases by issuing predictions that can be contradicted by the findings of empirical research. This is the falsifiability principle in a nutshell [p. 25].
Fuller neatly sums up the difference between the 20th century’s giants in the philosophy of science:
Whereas actual scientific communities existed for Popper only as more or less corrupt versions of the scientific ideal, for Kuhn the scientific ideal is whatever has historically emerged as the dominant scientific communities [p. 6].
* Page numbers refer to the Icon Books 2006 paperback edition.
Related post:
Theoretically, the Kalman Filter is an estimator for what is called the linear-quadratic problem, which is the problem of estimating the instantaneous “state” [...] of a linear system perturbed by white noise by using measurements linearly related to the state but corrupted by white noise. The resulting estimator is statistically optimal with respect to any quadratic function of estimation error.
Practically, it is certainly one of the greater discoveries in the history of statistical estimation theory and possibly the greatest discovery in the twentieth century. It has enabled humankind to do many things that could not have been done without it, and it has become as indispensable as silicon in the makeup of many electronic systems. Its most immediate applications have been for the control of complex dynamic systems such as continuous manufacturing processes, aircraft, ships, or spacecraft. To control a dynamic system, you must first know what it is doing. For these applications, it is not always possible or desirable to measure every variable that you want to control, and the Kalman filter provides a means for inferring the missing information from indirect (and noisy) measurements. The Kalman filter is also used for prediction the likely future courses of dynamic systems that people are not likely to control, such as the flow of rivers during flood, the trajectories of celestial bodies, or the prices of traded commodities.
Yay! The above is the opening paragraphs of Mohinder S. Grewal and Angus P. Andrews Kalman Filtering: Theory and Practice Using MATLAB, Second Edition (2001, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.), which currently is under my scrutiny.
In Kuhn vs. Popper, Steve Fuller discusses and compares the two most important philosophers of science in the 20th century; Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper. The book is not what I expected it to be (what I expected is not entirely clear, but that is not the point). The book as a broader view than I expected, for example, revisiting philosophers from Plato to contemporary and, to me, new names like Rorty, and shuffles over themes from theology to nazism. The broad view is indeed intentional and announced in the introduction:
This book is designed to recapture the full range of issues that separate these two self-styled defenders of science [Kuhn and Popper, of course]. Many of the issues plumb the depths of the Western psyche: What is the relationship beteween knowledge and power? Can science bring unity to knowledge? Can history bring meaning to life? At the same time, these issues are entangled in more secular concerns about economy and society, politics and war most of which are still very much with us today [p. 3].*
While I cannot say I found every twist of the book equally interesting, it did help me understand the the ideas of Kuhn and Popper better than before and even correct things I got wrong. For one thing, I used to think of Popper as the normative and Kuhn as the descriptive; Fuller claims I was wrong:
It was not, as is often said, that Kuhn was more ‘descriptive’ and his rivals [the Popperians] more ‘prescriptive’ with respect to the history of science [p. 208].
Thomas Kuhn (1922 - 1996)
According to Fuller, the Popperians appeared ‘perversly contrarian’ to the public when they imposed a normative perspective on the history of science; to the public, science’s authority was self-evicent. Kuhn, on the other hand, ‘never articulated the norm’ he imposed when he selected and arranged the historical examples he used in his arguing (p. 209). In other words, one needs a rather good idea of the history of science in order to see and understand that Kuhn presents only the examples that fits with his theory; according to Fuller, hsitory is abound with examples less in accordance with Kuhn’s theory.
A thing I do not like about the book is that it is densely written, and in order to follow it, one need to at least be acquainted with the theories of Kuhn and Popper up front; Fuller only briefly summarizes the ideas. I find this surprising, as the cover is littered with acclaim from newspapers like the Economist and the Financial Times with the obvious purpose to attract the general reader. According to Fuller, this involved writing, presupposing knowledge of the issue at hand was a trademark of Popper, and, I’m afraid, many philosophers:
Popper and Adorno [another philosopher Popper locked horns with] shared the critic’s tendency [not entirely clear to me what 'the critic's tendency' is supposed to point to here] to presuppose that the audience already knows the target of criticism in some detail, so that one’s own discourse becomes a series of reflections on the hidden opponent. This feature made it frustrating for listeners who sought constructive advice on the conduct of social research [p. 154].
Frustrating indeed, do you listen, Fuller? (I guess not.)
Now, while flipping through the book, I realize I’ve underlined too many quotable passages and marked too many passages to address them all in one post. I will thus try to focus my opinion of this book in a later post; stay tuned.
* To be sure, page numbers refer to the Icon Books 2006 paperback edition.
Related post:
Today’s picture is a tounge-in-cheek response to John Whitehead’s picture over at Env-Econ:
Gardner Brown and Daniel A. Hagen guestedited a recent special issue of Environmental & Resource Economics (Vol. 46, No. 2), and suprisingly wrote the first article themselves. They begin like this:
Many economists have embraced a paradigm characterized by perfect information, rational expectations and an otherwise benign environment in which perfect competition reigns, with very minor asides for imperfect competition. Rumblings of opposition have been growing louder. Nobel prizes are being awarded to scholars who have taken us out of this historic straight jacket. Lo and behold there can be asymmetric information, increasing returns to scale, cooperative behavior and agents who consistently fail to optimize.
Behavioral economics is another theme gathering strength, and it may be particularly germane to environmental and resource economics. Consumer theory, measurement of benefits, intergenerational discounting, mechanism design, and the role of fairness are all subjects of importance for environmental and resource economics and they are all areas in which behavioral economicsmay provide important insights.
I am supposed to be working, but I then I an op-ed, by Doublas Coupland in The New York Times, caught my attention: A Dictionary of the Near Future:
The thing about the future is that it never feels the way we thought it would. New sensations require new terms; below are a few such terms to encapsulate our present moment.
I regcognize myself in a lot of the terms, Airport-Induced Identity Dysphoria, for example:
AIRPORT-INDUCED IDENTITY DYSPHORIA Describes the extent to which modern travel strips the traveler of just enough sense of identity so as to create a need to purchase stickers and gift knick-knacks that bolster their sense of slightly eroded personhood: flags of the world, family crests, school and university merchandise.
It goes deep, wonder what economists have to say about this:
CRYSTALLOGRAPHIC MONEY THEORY The hypothesis that money is a crystallization or condensation of time and free will, the two characteristics that separate humans from other species.
I am dimanchophobic every now and then, approximately once a week:
DIMANCHOPHOBIA Fear of Sundays, a condition that reflects fear of unstructured time. Also known as acalendrical anxiety. Not to be confused with didominicaphobia or kyriakephobia, fear of the Lord’s Day.
So not true:
INTRAVINCULAR FAMILIAL SILENCE We need to be around our families not because we have so many shared experiences to talk about, but because they know precisely which subjects to avoid.
Fair enough, true, but is it a real problem, or just the manifestation of deeper problems regarding attention spans or commitments, or both?
KARAOKEAL AMNESIA Most people don’t know the complete lyrics to almost any song, particularly the ones they hold most dear. (See also Lyrical Putty)
?:
PROCELERATION The acceleration of acceleration.
Mere word play:
PSEUDOALIENATION The inability of humans to create genuinely alienating situations. Anything made by humans is a de facto expression of humanity. Technology cannot be alienating because humans created it. Genuinely alien technologies can be created only by aliens. Technically, a situation one might describe as alienating is, in fact, “humanating.”
So that’s what standard deviation means, I hear it all the time:
STANDARD DEVIATION Feeling unique is no indication of uniqueness, and yet it is the feeling of uniqueness that convinces us we have souls.
