Modern Society Archives - Page 13 of 21

What is a Social Science?

We hear a lot about the failures of economics to perfectly predict the future. I’ll admit to being puzzled about that argument. What is the measuring stick here? Is Economics worse at predicting the future than English Literature or Philosophy? Obviously not. But equally obviously, the comparison in the criticism of Economics is to Chemistry, Physics or Biology, which do very well at predicting the future in laboratory experiments.

Economists do like to compare themselves to the natural scientists. No Humanities, please, we are Scientists! This comparison of economics to the natural sciences elicits lots of derision, even from with the fold. Frank Knight, for example:

In the field of social policy, the pernicious notion of instrumentalism, resting on the claim or assumption of a parallelism between social and natural sciences, is actually one of the most serious of the sources of danger which threaten destruction to the values of what we have called civilization.

Knight wrote that in 1942. When you think of other possible threats to the values of civilization which were occurring in 1942, that claim is a little over-the-top. But even if we moderate the tone a bit, it is exactly the sort of thing that really begs the question: what is a social science?

A little history of the development of knowledge in the West is enough to show that the question of whether Economics is more akin to Chemistry or English Literature is not really as vital a question as most people imagine. It is really more interesting to ask whether Chemistry is really different than English Literature. Answer that, and the Economics question gets a lot easier.

When the idea of the liberal arts were being developed in Ancient Greece, there was not a distinction made between the three modern divisions in the Academy (Humanities, Sciences, Social Sciences). From Plato and Aristotle through Leonardo, it was common to see educated people working across what we now consider to be disparate disciplines. The liberal arts had great unity.

The beginnings of the Scientific Revolution mark an important break point. Newton’s massively important work commonly known simply as the Principia, was formally entitled Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. The title is important because first it shows the connection to the past in that Newton was writing what was considered to be a philosophical work, studying a branch of philosophy called “Natural Philosophy.” However, the work’s emphasis that Natural Philosophy is best understood using mathematical principles points to the future. Natural Philosophy subsequently had a different method than other types of philosophy. As Galileo expressed it earlier, the book of the universe is written in mathematics. (It is worth noting that Newton ended the Principia, which simultaneously invented calculus and explained the motions of the planets in the solar system, with a discussion of the implications of this work, saying that this massive book on the mathematical principles of natural philosophy proved that there was a God. Newton did not see himself as something other than a philosopher.)

Francis Bacon’s role in the development of science as something distinct from the humanities is also important to note. In “The Advancement of Learning” (which, recall, was published in 1605, 82 years before the Principia), Bacon articulated what we now call the scientific method. This was a new idea in the history of thought, that natural philosophy, or science, used a different method than the study of other areas. Bacon further proposed the creation of a scientific academy, memorably describing a fictional academy of this sort in The New Atlantis.

Looking at the work of these pioneers in the evolution of natural philosophy into a separate subject that we now call “science,” it is hard to overestimate how profound a break this was in the way we think about learning. In Aristotle, for example, there is no difference in method between his Physics, Poetics, Politics, or even Nicomachean Ethics. All these works read the same way. In the 21st century, there is no confusion about whether a particular book is a work of science or humanities. The methods themselves are quite different. The change was not instantaneous with the advent of the scientific revolution. The important scientific works of the 18th and 19th century were still written to be accessible to the generally educated reader. However, the specialization of the 20th century made these divisions complete. This is most evidenced by seeing the difference between the works of Einstein and Newton, both towering figures in the history of physics. Einstein’s important works are in technical articles written for specialists while Newton wrote expansive books written for everyone.

As the scientific method was being developed in the 19th century, people began to realize that the methods of science might also be useful to study things other than natural phenomenon. This realization was the birth of what we now call the Social Sciences. Note the name. The idea was to use scientific methods to study social phenomenon. Auguste Comte is often thought of as the most important pioneer in the development of something we can call the social sciences, but his importance is easily overstated. With the excitement of the discovery of all sorts of natural phenomena using these new methods of study, it was inevitable that people would begin to use the methods to study human interactions.

As the idea of using scientific methods to study social phenomena took hold, the disciplines we now group together in the social sciences gradually became distinct from both the humanities and the sciences. This idea of a distinct area called Social Science was also a novel idea in the history of thought. Adam Smith, for example, is generally credited as being the first economist on the basis of his book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which is, it is well worth noting, a vastly more extensive book than people who have never read it in its entirety would realize. This book was Smith’s second book, however. His first, also a massively important text in the Scottish Enlightenment, was Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith did not view himself as an “economist,” in other words. He was an old fashioned philosopher.

The philosophers of the 19th century who we now consider to be “economists” would similarly have rejected the idea they were writing in a narrow discipline for a specialized audience. One can profitably read Malthus and Ricardo and Marx and Mill regardless of one’s area of modern specialization. The break in economics came in the early 20th century, not insignificantly at the very time Einstein was creating a break in the writing about physics. The early 20th century, led by extremely influential books by Alfred Marshall (in England) and Leon Walras (in France), set economics on the path to becoming a separate discipline within the broader realm of the social sciences. The participants of this broader transition in the study of economics figured out how to use mathematics as a vehicle for uncovering regularities in economics and social behavior. They were, in other words, explicitly using the scientific methods pioneered by the early scientists to study social phenomena. Perhaps the laws of society, like the laws of nature, are also written in the language of mathematics.

As the discipline of economics grew, this emphasis on using mathematics and statistics to create and test models of reality has become the defining characteristic of the field. In other words, it is the very fact that economics uses tools of this sort that makes it a social science instead of one of the disciplines in the humanities.

Is economics then a science? This has been an extensively debated question in the philosophy of science. The proposition that it is a science is difficult to defend without using a definition of science so broad that it would include any application of mathematics and statistics to understanding the world. As the terms become understood in the 20th century, the social sciences were distinct from the sciences by the nature of their objects of study. While both the sciences and social sciences study people, the historical distinction was that the sciences studied the mechanical aspects of people while the social sciences studied the results of the decisions made by people.

There is, as we have seen, no natural reason to divide the liberal arts into three categories. There is no reason at all other than historical tradition that we do not have 2 or 4 or 12 divisions in the Academy. Moreover, the walls between the realms of knowledge are constantly under assault. Sociobiology, for example, argues that science can be used to explain all of human history, that the discipline of history itself should really be considered to be a subject of biology. These assaults on the walls of separation are not surprising given the relatively recent history of the walls themselves. As Robert Frost noted, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” (Incidentally, for an added bonus, think about when this poem was published relative to the other works discussed in this section. Not a coincidence.)

Extreme Economies

For obvious reasons, I am frequently asked for recommendations of good economics books for non-economists. There are not nearly as many options as one would hope. There are lots of interesting books on particular topics, but not that many that I can just recommend to anyone.

There is a new book that fits this category perfectly which I am happy to recommend to one and all. Richard Davies: Extreme Economies: What Life at the World’s Margins Can Teach Us About Our Own Future.

Davies travels the world to visit nine places which are indeed examples of economies at the extreme edge of things. It’s a clever idea. Instead of looking for average locales to see how things work, find places where some event or other has pushed the economy far from the norm. Go there and see how things work. Or, in some cases, don’t work. He splits his nine cases into three categories: Survival (where things work), Failure (where things don’t), and Future (where we get a glimpse of what is to come for all of us).

What sets this book so far ahead of the pack is that both the economics and the writing are quite good. Davies can write like a journalist. Each chapter could easily have been published in something like The Atlantic, Wired, or The New Yorker. These are all fascinating stories which are extremely well-told. You will actually enjoy reading this book. Good journalism is one thing, but good journalism in which the economics doesn’t make me cringe? Well, that is a rare beast.

The punchline of the book? Adam Smith was right in The Wealth of Nations: man is a trading animal.

This division of labor, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual, consequence of a certain propensity in human nature, which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.

Whether this propensity be one of those original principles in human nature, of which no further account can be given, or whether, as seems more probable, it be the necessary consequence of the faculties of reason and speech, it belongs not to our present subject to inquire. It is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals, which seem to know neither this nor any other species of contracts.

People like to trade with one another. The act of trading is what creates economies. How does this work? Well, here Davies beautifully illustrates Hayek’s notion of spontaneous order. Set up the rules of the game and next thing you know an ordered social system spontaneously arises.

Spontaneous order is perfectly illustrated in Davies three success stories. First we have Aceh, Indonesia, which was completely devastated, as in razed to the ground, by a tsunami in 2004. There was literally nothing left standing. The second is Zaatari, Jordan, which is the largest refugee camp in the world. The third is a prison in Louisiana, which has the largest per capita incarceration rate in the US.

All three locations provide stunning stories of human ingenuity. None of these locations seem like promising place to find economies functioning well. And yet, in all three cases, Davies finds a very vibrant economic order. Aceh is now a nice booming town, much more vibrant than it was before the devastation. The refugee camp in Jordan has a massive, well-organized black market where you can get whatever you need at competitive prices. The prisoners in Louisiana developed an entire monetary system which can be used to purchase goods which are smuggled into the prisons. The monetary system described in this last chapter is so clever, I’ll be assigning this chapter in my future money and banking courses.

OK, I’ll tell you what they do in the Louisiana prison. Normal currency is banned in the prisons, so you don’t want to be caught using it. Instead, they use the technology of prepaid debit cards. There are single use scratch cards (MoneyPak) that have a 14 digit number (the “dots”) which the owner can use to load funds onto a debit card. You can buy these scratch cards with cash, so there is no record of who bought them.

To make a large cash payment a prisoner asks a friend on the outside to buy a MoneyPak and to pass on the dots once they have done so. These 14 digits, as good as hard cash, can then be exchanged with a guard or another prisoner for something in the prison, including drugs. By exchanging dots instead of cash, the prisoners keep their hands clean. The free people on the outside—one buying the MoneyPak, the other receiving its value on a Green Dot card—do not need to meet each other, know each other or link bank accounts. Using pre-paid cards in this way creates an informal currency that is durable, divisible into payments as small as the MoneyPak minimum of $20 and is accepted everywhere. It fits precisely the standards for a good currency that Jevons and Menger set out centuries ago

People are very clever.

But, sometimes being clever is not enough, which leads to Davies’ Failures. The Darien Gap in Panama, should be a vibrant economic hub linking South America to North America. Kinshasa, DR Congo is sitting on a wealth of natural resources and is one of the poorest countries in the world. Glasgow, UK used to be the second most prosperous and vibrant city in the UK and is now one of the poorest.

What happened in each of these failures? Markets didn’t develop. In all three cases there is an external force that prevents the sort of spontaneous creation of markets that allow people to take advantage of the resources which are there. The result is a hopeless poverty. People hunker down, don’t interact much with others, and the society just decays into collapse.

Those six chapters alone would make this book well worth reading. But, then comes the discussions about the future. This is where you get to find to if you are an optimist or a pessimist. After reading these three chapters you will either think that humans are clever enough to solve these problems (like in the first three chapters of the book) or we aren’t clever enough (like in the second three chapters of the book). But, there is no doubt Davies has identified three things which will shape the next century.

He begins with Akita, Japan, a city of no particular note in Japan. Well, one particular note: it is an old city. A very old city. It’s not the buildings or landmarks that are old, though. It is the population. The average age in Japan as a whole is rapidly rising. Japan is not alone in this. As Davies notes, by 2050 in both South Korea and Japan the average age will be 53, and more than a third of the population will be over 65. How does a society function when a third of the people are retired? Well, if Akita is an example of what it is to come: it doesn’t. China, Europe and the US are facing similar demographic changes in the next 50 years. There simply are not enough young people to balance out all the people who will be retiring.

Next up we have Tallinn, Estonia. This is a place that has gone to the extreme in becoming a digital paradise. Just about every aspect of government is digitized. Even citizenship. No matter where you live in the world, you can become a digital citizen of Estonia. You want to know what it is like when everything about you is all sitting on a computer server somewhere? You want to know what it is like to live where the government can potentially look up everything about you? Where robots and AI are rapidly reshaping the whole economy? You want to see the digital future? Visit Tallinn.

And finally, Davies goes to Santiago, Chile to look at income inequality. It was a brilliant choice. Chile is the most prosperous country in South America. The poor in Chile are richer than the poor in other places on the continent. And yet, you can visually see the income divide in Santiago. When both the rich and the poor get richer, that does not mean the gap between the rich and the poor gets narrower. What happens if the gap gets large, very large? Is it enough to say the poor are richer than they used to be and richer than they would be in other places? Will that be enough to keep the poor happy? In other words, is it absolute or relative income that matters to people? That is the question facing Santiago.

Like I said, this book is really good. If you are stuck at home thinking about the future, this is a perfect book to read. You can buy a copy by clicking on the picture of the book cover above. Highly recommended.

What Economic Models Can and Can’t Tell Us

It has been obvious from the coverage of the coronavirus pandemic that most people simply do not understand the nature of models.

This is not surprising. Models are messy things, and few people have spent much time thinking about how they work.

There are two parts to a model. First, there is the structure of the model, which is a bunch of mathematical equations that show how one thing is connected to another. The number of equations and the mathematical complexity of the equations can both be quite high, but fundamentally the structure of a model is just like those two-equation, two-unknown problems you learned to solve in your algebra class. Second, there are the data you use in the model. If you have bad data, then the model will not be useful, no matter how carefully it is constructed. Again, your algebra class gives an example: if you know that Y is twice as large as X, but you don’t know the size of X, then the model is not terribly useful in telling you the size of Y.

The epidemiological models that are garnering so much attention in the coronavirus pandemic are not fundamentally different from economic models or weather forecasting models. They have a mathematical structure, and they use existing data to make predictions. Different epidemiological models give different results because they are built differently. Not surprisingly, modelers generally think their particular model is the best. Unfortunately, as of this date, the details of many of the models that are informing policy decisions have not been released to the public, so there is no way for others to evaluate the structures of the models themselves.

Perhaps even more importantly, the data that are being used are woefully incomplete. Consider the fatality rate numbers. To know the fatality rate, you have to know both the number of deaths and the number of infections. We have decent, but not perfect, data on the number of deaths. We do not have anywhere near enough data to know the number of infections. Without widespread, random samples of the population, there is no way to know that number. You can get the same number of deaths with high levels of infections and a low death rate or with low numbers of infections and a high death rate. Which of those scenarios is accurate? The answer has enormous implications for how easy it is to spread the disease in daily interaction.

A model that uses messy data will not give a precise answer. Instead, it will give a range—possibly quite large—of potential outcomes. There is an instinctive reaction in the press to latch onto the most alarmist numbers. We saw this with the Imperial College model, which has been the most influential model in this crisis. Headlines blared that the model predicted that, if nothing was done, there would be half a million deaths in the UK and over two million deaths in the US. A short time later, there was a follow-up announcement that the same model was predicting the number of deaths in the UK would be around 20,000. Much hand-wringing ensued. The real problem here is not that a model gave a different answer as we acquired better data and people’s behavior changed. The real problem was the media’s sensationalism about the upper end of predictions from a model built over thirteen years ago to predict flu pandemics.

Read the rest at Public Discourse

Trippin’ With Pollan

Wanna try some LSD? Or ‘shrooms? How about some toad venom?

According to Michael Pollan…yes, that Michael Pollan, the well-respected author of The Omnivores Dilemma, the guy whose advice you would never be embarrassed to admit you were following, according to That Michael Pollan…your answer should be an enthusiastic Yes.

How to Change Your Mind is a 400 page (New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book of the Year in 2018!) argument about the amazing benefits of psychedelic drugs. Here is the subtitle: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. You see: How to Change Your Mind is about how to quite literally change your mind through the use of psychedelic substances.

Right now, you fall into one of two camps. Either you are enthusiastically awaiting the explanation for why your psychedelic drug use is being defended in a bestselling book by a respected author or…well, you are wondering what is wrong with the world when Michael Pollan is writing and Your Humble Narrator is reading a defense of LSD. Believe me, until the Long Suffering Wife of Your Humble Narrator gave me this book for Christmas, I would have been in the latter camp too.

Pollan explains his mission:

Other societies have had long and productive experience with psychedelics, and their examples might have saved us a lot of trouble had we only known and paid attention. The fact that we regard many of these societies as “backward” probably kept us from learning from them. But the biggest thing we might have learned is that these powerful medicines can be dangerous—both to the individual and to the society—when they don’t have a sturdy social container: a steadying set of rituals and rules—protocols—governing their use, and the crucial involvement of a guide, the figure that is usually called a shaman. Psychedelic therapy—the Hubbard method—was groping toward a Westernized version of this ideal, and it remains the closest thing we have to such a protocol. For young Americans in the 1960s, for whom the psychedelic experience was new in every way, the whole idea of involving elders was probably never going to fly. But this is, I think, the great lesson of the 1960s experiment with psychedelics: the importance of finding the proper context, or container, for these powerful chemicals and experiences.

The history of psychedelics is fascinating, far more so than I would have ever guessed. Once upon a time, way back in the 1950s, there was a growing scientific literature on the possible uses of psychedelics in treating psychological disorders. The research was still in its infancy, but it was starting to show some promise.

Then along came Timothy Leary, who is surprisingly the villain in this story. Leary single-handedly destroyed the scientific research into psychedelics with his flamboyant advocacy to an entire generation that they use LSD to “Turn On. Tune In. Drop Out.” The reputation of LSD and other psychedelic substances was transformed into the kind of thing John Lennon used in order to write trippy songs like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Tom Wolfe had a merry time describing the antics of these psychedelic adventurers in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Trip. By the early 1970s, everyone knew LSD was bad. Bad for you; bad for society.

That is not the end of the story. LSD is making a comeback! Pollan reports on a growing number of people who are picking up the scientific literature from the point where it was before Leary came along. It turns out there are quite a few clinical trials going on looking at how to use psychedelic drugs to treat things like PTSD. It’s science! If Pollan is right, you may be visiting your local hospital sometime in the next decade for your LSD treatment.

There is quite the cast of characters in this story. There is the woman who literally drilled a hole in her own head because (shockingly enough) no medical professional would do it for her. There is the guy who roams around State Parks finding psychedelic mushrooms. There are the people who really do ingest toad venom. And Pollan wants to convince you that while these people may be odd, the psychedelic treatment really works.

What is it about psychedelics that helps so much in treating psychological problems? This is where the book gets, well, trippy. Pollan interviews a bunch of people who have taken psychedelic substances and relates what they discovered while they were under the influence. The stories are…weird. So, he decides we will all be better off if he gives us some first-hand stories. Three times, he takes a psychedelic drug and then he gives us a lengthy report of what happened next. These stories are…weird. As Pollan notes:

It embarrasses me to write these words; they sound so thin, so banal. This is a failure of my language, no doubt, but perhaps it is not only that. Psychedelic experiences are notoriously hard to render in words; to try is necessarily to do violence to what has been seen and felt, which is in some fundamental way pre- or post-linguistic or, as students of mysticism say, ineffable. Emotions arrive in all their newborn nakedness, unprotected from the harsh light of scrutiny and, especially, the pitiless glare of irony. Platitudes that wouldn’t seem out of place on a Hallmark card glow with the force revealed truth.
Love is everything.
Okay, but what else did you learn?
No—you must not have heard me: it’s everything!

Yep, that is exactly what all the stories in this book sound like. Does it make you want to indulge?

But, Pollan keeps insisting, this is not just a tale of weird trips. Not at all. Pollan has discovered something in his research, both in the second-hand and first-hand research. Consciousness is bigger than you thought. Indeed, consciousness lies outside your skull. Consciousness is part of a vaster realm of being. When you use psychedelic drugs, you discover a deeper and larger and greater and lovelier world than the one in which you currently live. You take LSD and your mind wanders in this other word and you see a door and you go through the door (always go through the door!) and it is all…amazing.

And there again, it all sounds so meaningless. So, Pollan tries again. And again. And again. He is screaming at you, “Don’t you see?”

And what does he want you to see? You have a soul.

As he notes, he is not the first person to discover a soul. Religious writings are full of discussions of a soul. Transcendentalists are full of discussion about a soul. But, Pollan never believed there was a soul, a part of you that is beyond this mortal coil. Now he knows better. Now, he says, he perfectly understands Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

Who knew the key to thinking Emerson was deep was taking LSD?

This is a book that defies easy analysis. It is one part insane rants about weird mystical trips. It is one part a fascinating historical survey of scientific research into psychedelic drugs. It is one part bizarre tales of bizarre people. It is one part a glimpse into the possible future uses of psychedelic drugs to treat PTSD and addiction. It is one part an argument for a nontangible soul. It is a thoroughly bizarre book full of wonder and madness and tedium.

Should you read it? I honestly have no idea.

You Like Comic Books?

Nothing arouses greater bewilderment in my students than when I mention that I enjoy reading comic books.

It’s as if there is a thought bubble over their heads containing the words, “Uh, you are a college professor and you like comic books?!?!”

Thought bubbles are part of the language of comic books, by the way.

Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art is an attempt to explain the medium. If McCloud is right, then not only should you stop despising the form, you really ought to embrace the form and be excited for what is coming. It’s a fun book, full of historical tidbits and philosophical ruminations. It is also a comic book.

Why the disdain for comic books? I was talking with a student not too long ago about this. I noted that she thought it was perfectly fine to like Novels and other written texts and it is perfectly fine to like Paintings and other forms of visual art. So, why, I asked, is it impossible to imagine combining words and pictures and creating something amazing? Her answer, completely unbeknownst to her, was straight out of McCloud’s book:

Traditional thinking has long held that truly Great works of art and literature are only possible when the two are kept at arm’s length. Words and Pictures Together are considered at best a diversion for the Masses, at worst a product of crass commercialism.

This is true about how people think. Think of a Great Book, any Great Book; the book you thought about almost certainly was all words. Now think of a Great Work of Art; that art almost certainly has no words. McCloud:

By the early 1800s, Western Art and Writing had drifted about as far apart as was possible. One was obsessed with resemblance, light and color, all things visible…the other rich in invisible treasures, sense, emotions, spirituality, philosophy.

But, are these things logically separated? Obviously not. Indeed, figuring out how to effectively combine these two disparate worlds into one could surely produce something amazing. That thing which would be produced would be…a comic book.

The bulk of McCloud’s book is devoted to analyzing the form and structure of the comic book. What is the difference between a panel in which the words are influenced by the art and a panel in which the art is influenced by the words? What is the taxonomy of ways that the words and the art can influence each other? How does the shape of a panel affect the way we read it? What is the effect of changing the space between the panels, removing the border from a panel, or having the art reach to the end of the page? What is the effect of color?

In other words this is a technical book about Comics. Chances are, unless you already appreciate the form, you find the idea of reading a technical discussion about the structure of a comic book to be just about as silly as reading comic book. Why do you think like that? Because of your upbringing.

As children, our first books had pictures galore and very few words because that was easier. Then, as we grew, we were expected to graduate to books with much More text and only occasional pictures—and Finally to arrive at “Real” books—those with no pictures at all. Or perhaps, as is sadly the case these days, to no Books at all.

Because this is the way we were all raised, the comic book market has long been associated with people who have not yet learned to read “real” books. For a long time, that was the only large scale market for comic books, and so they achieved their status as things adults didn’t read. I remember as a kid wondering why my local library had no comic books. They were expensive to buy, so I would have liked to have been able to get them from the library. Now I realize why they didn’t have them. The arbiters of taste knew that I was better off reading books with no pictures. Perhaps my intellectual development would have been stunted if I had been able to read more about Batman when I was a kid. (Watching him on a TV show was apparently OK as long as I didn’t ever read a Batman story.)

While the reputation of comic books remains static, the world of comic books has changed. Since 1986, it is hard to justify the argument that there is not a realm where comic books are exploring the possibility of becoming Great Books. That year saw a remarkable trio of books. Spiegelman’s Maus, Moore’s Watchmen, Miller’s, The Dark Knight Returns. All three are extraordinary, doing things that could not be done in any other medium. And all three are written for adults. Maus has made the furthest inroads into educational culture; it is, after all, a very compelling account of the Holocaust. Moore’s book made Time magazine’s list of the 100 best books (not comic books, books!) of the 20^th century. Miller’s was the genesis of the most successful of all superhero movie trilogies.

Since then, there has been a steady stream of comic books which move far beyond the antics of Superman and Spider-Man. Most of them are not very good. But, recall: most books without pictures and most pictures without books are also not very good. That isn’t the question. The question is whether a decent comic book is inherently worse than a decent novel with no pictures. The question is why so many people can’t imagine that a future Great Books list will include some books with pictures.

Learning to read is truly one of the most amazing things we learn to do. But, it is a tragedy that we associate learning to read as meaning learning to read when there is no art on the page.

Want to Hear a Story?

Would you rather hear a story or work through an economic model?

Yeah, I know that is a very tough question to answer. They are both so enticing. Fortunately, a good story and an economic model are not as different as you think.

Robert Shiller wants to talk about stories. Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events is all about stories. Bitcoin, Rubik’s Cubes, Stock Market Bubbles, Social Distancing. OK, that last one isn’t in this book, but it will almost certainly be in the extra chapter added in the paperback version whenever that comes out.

This is one of those books you really read just for the stories Shiller wants to tell. He has lots of stories (so many stories!) about how a narrative goes viral and suddenly everyone believes the narrative. Why? Well, you know the narrative is true because everyone else is saying the same thing, and if everyone believes it, then it must be true, right?

The interesting thing about the narratives that influence public policy making is that sometimes the narrative actually is true. But, not always. Once a narrative gets established in the popular imagination is it very hard to dislodge it. As Shiller notes, “Truth is Not Enough to Stop False Narratives.” Therein lies the problem. Think of all the things you know to be true about the economy. You most likely know these things are true because you have heard multiple people saying similar things. Some of those things you know actually are true. Some are not. How to tell the difference?

Shiller’s argument is that these narrative stories spread much like a virus. He even has an appendix on “Applying Epidemic Models to Economic Narratives.” (Sometimes a book and a particular historical moment just accidentally coincide.) How quickly the economic narrative spreads depends on the contagion rate and the recovery rate (you might have heard about these sorts of models lately). The contagion rate is how easy it is for someone to believe the economic narrative; the recovery rate is how easy it is for someone to stop believing the narrative.

If you think about all those internet stories about some absurd, impossible thing that people send around to each other, you see how this works. The contagion rate is how believable it is to people who want to believe such things. The recovery rate is how long it takes for people to look up the story on Snopes and find out it is yet another crazy story with no basis in reality. Some stories just die right away. Others linger for a very long time.

Shiller tells all sorts of stories about how people become convinced about economic reality. He does try to sketch out a theory on how this all works, but the theory is so cursory that it has zero predictive value. “Epidemics can be Fast or Slow, Big or Small.” Uh, yeah, that about covers all the options. “Narrative Constellations Have More Impact than Any One Narrative.” Well, that is at least an important observation. “Contagion of Economic Narratives Builds on Opportunities for Repetition.” Now that one is actually interesting.

I was talking with a student not too long ago about how quickly the coronavirus narratives spread—not the virus, but the stories about the virus. She noted that on social media, you can see a story and then five seconds later you see another person repeating the same story, and so after a few minutes on social media, you have seen the same story repeated many times. Extrapolate—if you see the same idea repeated every five seconds as you scroll through your favorite social media platform, then after 10 minutes, you have thought about it 120 times. Now that you have thought the same thing 120 times, you know it is true.

Think about product shortages. You read that stores are running out of essential products. You aren’t worried. Then you read it again, and again, and again as people keep sending out the same story over and over. Next thing you know, you rush to the store to buy everything is sight before everything is gone. Suddenly a store does run out of something, and that generates another round of stories and another panic wave of buying. Nothing at all happened to the supply chains here; there never was a real shortage. This is, by the way, exactly the same story as the bank runs of the early 1930s.

Shiller’s book is thus a fun read if you like to watch how economic narratives spread. But, it is also important in another way. There are far too many economists who have lost sight of what an economic model actually is. They look all mathy and exciting, so lots of economists think that an economic model is just a bunch of math giving an excuse to do some statistical work. But, economic models are narratives. They tell a story. If you step back from the math just a bit, you can see the story. And the dirty little secret of far too many economic models is that it is pretty obvious they are false as soon as you translate the story into words. But, most economists never do that.

Alfred Marshall, a first rate mathematician who was part of the move in the early 20^th century which increased the amount of mathematics in economics, once noted:

But I know I had a growing feeling in the later years of my work at the subject that a good mathematical theorem dealing with economic hypotheses was very unlikely to be good economics: and I went more and more on the rules—(1) Use mathematics as a shorthand language, rather than as an engine of inquiry. (2) Keep them till you have done. (3) Translate into English. (4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life. (5) Burn the Mathematics. (6) If you can’t succeed in 4, burn 3. This last I often did.

That is a lesson far too many economists have forgotten. Shiller is trying to convince economists to pay more attention to how narratives about the economy spread. But, the other important thing a book like this might do is convince economists that they already are looking at narratives every time they look at a mathematical model.