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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Economics As the Site of Human Synthesis8/28/2007 22:07:03I have lately been coming to the whim that economics is the place to be these days in the human sciences. It is a whim because I am far from an economist, but only an academic speculator, trying to figure out where the soil is ripe. My interest in the subject began with a recent paper of mine, Neoliberal Political Economy and the Religious Revival, which argued (quite poorly, according to my professor) for a connection between the logic of neoliberal economies and the rise of politicized religious movements. Though I am still no good at it, I learned the potential of economic reasoning doing research for that. What economics has to offer, I suspect, is a site for synthesis. There is a great deal of discovery going on in the human sciences these days, including evolutionary psychology, cognitive neuroscience, computer modeling of societies, anthropology, and comparative ethology. From various directions such as these, new tools are appearing with which to probe the natures of human nature. Since these are mainly coming from natural science fields, it seems odd that a social science like economics would be the beneficiary. It isn't. What economics offers that makes it so special is a playground, a playground with a lot of money floating around. Economists, much more than sociologists, psychologists, and for that matter, scholars of religion, can be in positions of power. They manage markets, work for the World Bank, advise governments, and work on international development. This means that, for better or worse, the world has made itself their perpetual testing ground. And the stakes for success are high. As a result, one would hope, theories that work will be replicated, while those that don't won't. Politics, of course, become a problem here, though I can't imagine they are any worse than the politics of an average university department. In the attempt to create workable models of human exchange behavior, economists are powerfully poised to take advantage of the work that is being done in a number of other fields. Thus modified, the standard rational choice frameworks can become incredibly powerful, as they more and more closely approximate human behavior. Also, as these models are incorporated, what has been called "the dismal science" begins to look up. The current "Freakonomics" movement certainly is evidence of this. The more economic models resemble human nature, the more human economic thought will begin to seem. Anyhow, these are my suspicions. I would love to discuss them with some real economists someday.
re: neuroeconomics - 10/26/2007 14:15:07
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