By the way, the piece on Dubai and UAE in the NYT today is a fascinating look at extreme inequality.

I’ve read many scholars concerned about inequality as such, and I think you must be the first to imply that there’s a quick fix.

1) I’m partial to Daniel’s point about the inextricable intertwinement of facts and values.

2) I’d take this in a slightly Geertzian direction: that the role of the social scientist may be, not a) to provide a version of reality we can all share, but b) to sharpen our sense of just how fundamental our differences our. For those purposes, it’s helpful to point out the disciplinary blinders and “deformations professionelles” any writer labors under.

3) I think that Mankiw’s work is ideological, but I think virtually any serious public intellectual has to be somewhat ideological; that is, has to be motivated by a vision of what a good society ought to look like and what human flourishing consists in.

It’s easy to caricature ideology; as Geertz observed in his essay Ideology as a Cultural System, it’s gotten quite a bad name over time:

“Edward Shils sketches a portrait of “the ideological outlook,” . . . [which] consists, most centrally, of ‘the assumption that politics should be conducted from the standpoint of a coherent, comprehensive set of beliefes which must override every other consideration.’ Like the politics it supports, it is dualistic, opposing the pure “we” to the evil “they,” proclaiming that he who is not with me is against me. It is alienative in that it distrusts, attacks, and works to undermine established political institutions. It is doctrinaire in that it claims complete and exclusive possession of political truth and abhors compromise. It is totalistic in that it aims to order the whole of social and cultural life in the image of its Ideals, futuristic in that it works toward a utopian culmination of history in which such an ordering will be realized. It is, in short, not the sort of prose any good bourgeois gentleman (or even any good democrat) is likely to admit to speaking.”

But ultimately, social science has to be ready check ideological ambitions even if it is in part motivated by them:

“Ideologies do make empirical claims about the condition and direction of society, which it is the business of science (and, where scientific knowledge is lacking, common sense) to assess. The social function of science vis-a-vis ideologies is first to understand them –what they are, how they work, what gives rise to them–and second, to criticize them, to force them to come to terms with (but not necessarily to surrender to) reality.”

My effort here is not to launch an ad hominem attack, but just to interrogate why a respected and intelligent social scientist would so casually dismiss the work of another person in his discipline.

4) Though I am not totally on-board with Deirdre McCloskey’s project in The Rhetoric of Economics, I do believe that a blog, journalism, and academic articles are to some extent rhetorical. As Aristotle observed in his work on rhetoric, “A speech consists of three things: the speaker, the subject which is treated in the speech, and the hearer to whom the speech is addressed (Rhet. I.3, 1358a37ff.)”. (from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-rhetoric/)

So the effectiveness of rhetoric is always going to depend on the character of the speaker. If someone is greatly benefiting from a system characterized by pervasive and easily remediable inequality, we might want to treat their defense of the system with extra skepticism.

I don’t see how it follows from the claim that we are interpretive beings and that interpretation is always required — such that there is no view from nowhere in which arguments and data exist unconstrained by interpretation — means that “truth-seeking is fundamentally doomed.”

The view-from-nowhere is generally, though not universally discredited in a variety of disciplines, and I seriously doubt that the scholars who repudiate it are uninterested in truth-seeking.

If I were to argue against a point made by, say Paul Krugman or Gary Becker, I wouldn’t try to dredge up their political leanings or their class background. Instead I’d look at their assumptions and the logic of their arguments.

As I indicated, surely the argument does not rise or fall on those background motivations, but neither does it mean such motivations are irrelevant. Wittgenstein argued that background is essential for any kind of meaning whatsoever, and more than a few current philosophers of mind argue that background is actually essential for consciousness (most notably Searle).

But what’s more, it is absolutely the case that Paul Krugman’s political predilections illumine his arguments, that they color his interpretation. How could they not? To say this is not to contend that the best way of critiquing his arguments, if one were disposed to do so, would be to attack his motives, but you made a strong claim that his motives are basically irrelevant to his arguments. And I simply disagree with that view.

Do you really believe that Justice Scalia or Justice Ginsburg’s political views do not color their interpretations of the Constitution? I don’t.

I tend to think that failing to take account of the notion that scholarship is fundamentally a human endeavor, and a practice, and therefore consists of subjects drawing interpretations about everything, is not necessarily the most fruitful avenue for scholarship.

But the factual question is just that, factual

Facts are never just facts. Hume famously attacked this position, and philosophers of both language and science have continually pointed out that facts are value-laden. They come preconceptualized, pre-interpreted.

I suspect our fundamental disagreement comes down to the nature of interpretation, and the utility and merit of the view-from-nowhere position, but this discussion has been helpful in reminding me how some social scientists (not singling you out, here, Chris) strive to adhere to a model of science and understanding that, IMO, has been fundamentally undermined by a generation of humanist scholars.

In any case, thanks for the discussion.

Well, I would say that the interpretation is part of the argument, so I’m not so sure I actually disagree with that. But as far as the Victor Fuchs example, to me that shows that health care is (like most important economic debates) fundamentally complex and thus it’s difficult to draw firm conclusions. To me, that’s not the same thing as throwing up our hands and declaring that truthseeking is fundamentally doomed, but I should say that I’m neither a philosopher of science nor a lawyer (rather a graduate student in economics), so I’m out of my element as far as those authors are concerned.

For an economist, though, it’s fundamentally weird to consider the background characteristics of someone making an argument about a question like housing prices. If I were to argue against a point made by, say Paul Krugman or Gary Becker, I wouldn’t try to dredge up their political leanings or their class background. Instead I’d look at their assumptions and the logic of their arguments. Maybe that’s hopelessly naive, but I don’t see how a scholar who is fundamentally concerned with truth can do differently. I’d like to think I’ve been reading Prof. Pasquale’s (excellent!) posts on Robert Frank’s book without discounting his arguments because he has previously expressed egalitarian beliefs. To do so is, I would argue, to betray a responsibility as a scholar.

I’m not sure I understand why arguments about character and motives are ever irrelevant in understanding why one takes a particular interpretive commitment.

They might explain why someone takes an interpretive commitment, but they can’t express whether or not a position is true. Consider the question, “Does raising the minimum wage affect unemployment?” That’s a factual question, though very diffcult to answer definitvely. For the sake of argument, suppose the consensus answer was “Yes, raising the minimum wage increases unemployment.” Then we could have an argument over whether the costs exceed the benefits, morality of the living wage, etc., and there I can see how motives would matter. But the factual question is just that, factual, and if the scholars are approaching the question openly, I fail to see what’s gained by venturing into motives.

I’ll let you all have the final word here, and simply point out that to me (and I would suspect, to most economists) the first part of this post, concerning Mankiw’s arguments, resonates far more than the latter, concerning Mankiw’s motives. Maybe that’s just a cross-discipline difference that cannot be bridged. (Also, I’d reiterate how much I’ve enjoyed the posts about Robert Frank from Prof. Pasquale. But I do object to arguments from motives, and will continue to do so.)

Moreover, I take issue with Chris’s claim that “arguments and data speak for themselves.” As philosophers of science like Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Keller have been arguing for decades, arguments and data most assuredly do not speak for themselves, but fundamentally require interpretation. If arguments and data spoke for themselves, one might wonder why, as Victor Fuchs (former President of AEA) noted in 1998, economists agree on little of importance regarding health care. I suppose one could attribute such widespread disagreement to the lack of any conclusions being “spoken” by the arguments and data, but I think it reveals that interpretations about the same data can and frequently are considerably divergent.

As such, I’m not sure I understand why arguments about character and motives are ever irrelevant in understanding why one takes a particular interpretive commitment. Of course, by themselves such points cannot establish the invalidity of an argument, but neither are they irrelevant, IMO.

And, as a further matter, I must say I’m not impressed with this post. Points (1) and (3) are arguments about character and motives rather than about data or logic, and (2) is an argument from authority, of sorts (though I wouldn’t call Taleb an authority in economics!) Maybe Mankiw’s not right here, but that’s pretty weak as a logical counterargument, at least in the eyes of this close-minded economist.