Oh, This is Too Good Not To Mention
September 11, 2011 by SocProf and tagged Sociology
Via Marcela, here is Paul Krugman on the economic profession and the crisis:
“In short, in responding to the crisis, the profession presented a sorry spectacle of unnecessary ignorance that didn’t even recognize itself as ignorance, of bitter debate over issues that were resolved many decades earlier. And all of this, of course, made the profession mostly useless at a time when it could and should have been of great service. Put it this way: we would have responded better to this crisis if macroeconomics had been frozen at the level of knowledge it had in 1948, when Paul Samuelson published the first edition of his famous textbook. And the result has been to leave actual policy discussion without any discipline from the people who should be shaping that discussion: politicians and officials have been free to follow their prejudices and intuitions, never mind the lessons of history and analysis. Economists have failed to fulfill their social function.
(…)
What we really need is a change in the destructive social dynamics that brought us to this point. And I wish I knew how to do that. But my problem is obvious: I’m an economist, and it seems that we need some kind of sociologist to solve our profession’s problems.”
“We need some kind of sociologist.” That’s what the “S” stands for.
This should become the motto of the American Sociological Association.
Of course, that is not going to happen because sociology is not a dominant social science, especially in the US, as opposed to economics (irrespective of the failure that Krugman describes in the article) and psychology (irrespective of the profession’s complicity with the torture regime).
And sociology does not carry any legitimacy with the Very Serious People in the media either, we would have to listen to a parade of hack pundits who have been wrong on everything before ever seeing a sociologist being asked for some analysis. I think it is partly because the discipline is associated with the Dirty Fucking Hippies.
Posted in Sociology | 1 Comment »
September 13th, 2011 at 6:05 pm
Actually, as a sociologist, I would argue that the last thing the economist need are sociologist. This process that he describes is not unique to economics and we can see something similar happening in sociology. The process as he describes it, “First, success in academic economics came from publishing “hard” papers — meaning papers that used rigorous and preferably difficult mathematics. This in itself biased publication toward equilibrium business cycle models, as opposed to the ad hoc modeling typical of what I consider useful macroeconomics. Graduate education, in turn, became increasingly focused on the kind of work that could get published and lead to tenure. Successive cohorts of students were trained only in the newly rigorous version of macro, which had lost touch with the field’s previous intellectual achievements.” – seems like it might be a larger process occurring on the institutional level throughout academia. I guess we could blame it on the economist but it didn’t stop there!