Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Science
and ideology
in
economics
ROBERT M. SOLOW
Relevance to what?
no doubt are) less urgent than the problems of war, poverty, racial
discrimination, urban decay, trafllc congestion, and the power of the
large corporation. That's where the relevance is now. Economics
tends to respond to shifts of opinion like this, but not overnight.
It takes time for middle-aged men to change their research interests
and their teaching, and it may take even longer for them to drum
up any interesting and useful things to say. The theoretical analysis
may be difllcult, and statistical data are rarely available about some-
thing that has just now reared up in public consciousness.
After the war, for instance, the economic development of Asia,
Africa, and Latin America became an interesting and important
problem, became suddenly relevant, that is, for the obvious reasons.
There were very few answers to begin with. In time, there came
into being a corps of talented and specialized people whose main
interest is the study of, and promotion of, economic development.
It is a difficult matter, in which economic forces and other forces
interact closely; the data are often scarce and unreliable; analogies
to what goes on in developed economies may break down; powerful
interests pull in different ways. Twenty years later, I'm not sure
there are many answers yet, but not for want of looking.
There is already a shift of activity underway in the direction of
work on the sort of problems that now seem most urgent. On some
of the easier ones, like traffic congestion, there is already a certain
amount of knowledge. Others will take more time and more work.
(And, by the way, the best allocation of scarce research resources
among competing ends is a good exercise in the theory of dimin-
ishing marginal utility.)
I have my doubts about that last bit of reasoning. It seals off dis-
cussion. If I disagree on an issue, the implication is that I am a paid
lackey of the System. If I protest that I, like Professor Heilbroner,
am above that, I am doubly suspect. It is like what happens if I say
that Freudian theory is obvious nonsense: I am told that I only say
that because of my relation with my mother. I protest that my mother
had nothing to do with it. "Seel" says my Freudian friend and walks
away a sure winner. ( Even in the days when I was a close student of
Marxism I used to wonder about a similar question: if social theory
is part of the ideological superstructure, hence not to be taken at
face value, why is not Marxism also part of the superstructure---and
in that case why should we take at face value the Marxist notion
that social theory is part of the ideological superstructure?) More-
over, I rather suspect that many more radicals are to be found among
those, and among the children of those, with incomes near $21,000
than among those with incomes nearer the median. Still, Heilbroner
does well to be suspicious.
But I really want to comment on Stigler's proposition, which
I-Ieilbroner accepts. I am interested in it because I have been
exposed to the scientific study of economics and do not regard
myself as politically conservative; and also because it seems to me
that economics has quite a strong radical potential too, especially
along equalitarian lines.
Are economists really conservative? As it happens, there is now
some evidence on that. Recently the Carnegie Foundation collected
questionnaire responses from a large sample of academic people.
Respondents were asked, among other things, how they would
characterize themselves politically among the possibilities of Left,
Liberal, Middle of the Road, Moderately Conservative, and Strongly
Conservative. Of the economists, 61.7 per cent classified themselves
as Left or Liberal, as compared with 47 per cent of the whole
sample. The economists were more conservative than the sociolo-
gists (80.5 per cent Left or Liberal), political scientists (71.8 per
cent), psychologists ( 69.1 ), anthropologists ( 69.4 ), historians ( 68.7 )
and teachers of English (65.8). They were less conservative than
mathematicians (47.3), chemists (44.8), physicists (54.4, biologists
(44.90), foreign-language teachers (56.0), medical school people
(40.6), teachers of education (44.7) and of engineering (28.9).
One might be led to the conclusion that the study of economics
makes one more conservative than does the study of sociology or
political science, but makes one more radical than does the study
of biology or mathematics or chemistry. I suspect that's not a good
98 THE PUBLIC INTEREST
Interdisciplinary economics?
ing, or because their tastes, such as they are, have been formed by
a wicked society to preserve itself. We are all, or most of us, in the
position of the Indian brave who has been hooked on cheap fire
water by the greedy fur trader; in what sense is he better off because
he willingly trades muskrat for rotgut?
No one can deny that advertisers advertise, and must have some
effects (though one could argue about how much) on the prefer-
ences of consumers. It is certain that our preferences are far more
social than biological or individual in origin. What should we con-
clude from these propositions? From the first, perhaps that adver-
tising ought to be limited by taxation or regulated as to truth. From
the second, what? Not, I hope, that individuals' judgments about
their own welfare should not be respected, whatever their origin.
One need only ask what could be put in their place--presumably
the judgments of an elite. The attack on consumer sovereignty per-
forms the same function as the doctrine of "repressive tolerance." If
people do not want what I see so clearly they should want, it can
only be that they don't know what they "really" want.
Now there are critical things that need be said about individual-
ist welfare economics, but they are rather different things, well
known inside the profession but not always understood outside it.
For example, as I mentioned earlier, the individualist criterion is
not complete. There are many questions on which it does not speak
at all, and it must be supplemented by sharper value judgments
that each society must make in its own characteristic way. For
example, the strict individualist criterion does not imply that it
would have been a good thing for the English government to have
relieved starvation in Ireland during the potato famine. It was,
however, a fallacy for the English to believe, as some of them did,
that the criterion did imply that it would have been a bad thing. It
is simply a separate decision. The individualist criterion does not
say that the rich should be taxed to help the poor, nor that they
shouldn't. It does say that if you decide to do so, it is in general
better to give the poor money than to give them what you think
they ought to consume. It takes a bit more than diminishing mar-
ginal utility to imply that you should in fact redistribute income
toward the poor, but it sure helps, as Professor Heilbroner remarked.
This is not a trivial matter. I said that the choices must be made,
and default is merely a way of making them. The radical critique
is right that merely to mumble something about not interfering with
the market is to favor the current holders of wealth and power.
Another problem arises not so much with the individualist wel-
106 THE PUBLIC INTEREST
Is science necessary?
The modern critics of economics and the other social sciences
rarely seem to do any research themselves. One has the impression
that they don't believe in it, that the real object of their dislike is the
idea of science itself, especially, but perhaps not only, social sci-
ence. A sympathetic description of their point of view might be: if
the ethos of objective science has led us to where we are, things
can hardly be worse if we give it up. A more impatient version
might be: what good is research to someone who already knows?
The critics, whether from the New Left or elsewhere, do not criti-
cize on the basis of some new discovery of their own, but on the
basis that there is nothing worth discovering---or rather that any-
thing that is discovered is likely to interfere with their own pre-
scriptions for the good society. My own opinion is that the good
society is going to need all the help it can get, in fact more than
most. A society that wants to be humane, even at the cost of efll-
ciency, should be looking for clever, unhurtful, practical knowledge.
Even Professor Heilbroner, who is a reasonable man, speaks of
the "scientific" paradigm, in quotes, as if there is some other way
to find out about the world. There is no other way. Economics can
be better or worse science, but it has no other choice. Breadth
IDEOLOGY IN ECONOMICS 107