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Who said econ and poli sci don't mix?
Dan Drezner
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KAI RYSSDAL: There was no lack of really big economic news this year. We had bank failures and bank bailouts, climate change and health care change, the technical end of the worst recession in 75 years. But we got to worrying that with all of that, maybe we missed something. News that slipped by without enough notice. So we asked a few of our regulars for the economic stories that didn't make the headlines.
Commentator Dan Drezner says one of the biggest was a change in the way we study the economy itself.
Dan Drezner: For decades, there was a clear but unspoken pecking order in the social sciences. Economists were royalty, and every other discipline was part of the peasantry. Economists were treated as real scholars, with their very own Nobel Prize and everything.
Political scientists, on the other hand, were mocked for having the word "science" in the title. The old joke goes that an economist who switches to studying political science raises the average intelligence of both disciplines. It's not true, but the perception is powerful. Powerful enough for Sen. Tom Coburn to have tried scrapping National Science Foundation funding for "poli sci" earlier this year.
Coburn's effort failed, however, and for good reason -- 2009 was a banner year for political scientists, and a not-so-banner year for economists. For much of the year, economists engaged in vicious infighting over their failure to anticipate the 2008 financial crisis.
To be sure, the economics profession was not completely responsible for the meltdown of markets. The proponents of "efficient markets theory," however, did contribute to a laissez-faire regulatory approach that allowed the asset market bubble to expand and then pop.
While economists have taken a big hit, the demand for political science has never been greater. In 2009, the U.S. Department of Defense started its Minerva program. It awards multimillion-dollar grants to political scientists to better understand areas of "strategic importance to U.S. national security policy." Risk consulting based on political science models also exploded in the past year. And in 2009, half of the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Elinor Ostrom, who is -- wait for it -- a political scientist.
Why is political science so hot? The Great Recession has dramatically increased the role of government in the economy. The more power given to the state, the greater the interest in analyzing how and why governments do what they do. The smart political scientists are meeting this demand with trenchant research and critical commentary. As for the not-so-smart political scientists? Well, maybe they can switch to economics.
Ryssdal: Daniel Drezner is a professor of international politics at Tufts University. His most recent book is called "All Politics is Global."
I'm a lowly political scientist, but know enough about my field to say we're pretty lousy at prediction apart from confirming some obvious things, like attributing congressional behavior to the desire to be reelected. International Relations folks didn't anticipate the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. And as for Minerva? I recall political scientists serving the state in the past--like Michigan State helping create police forces in Latin America, ones that in turn served well their murderous authoritarian regimes, or Gabriel Almond's 1950s survey of US leftists, and presenting the government with the convenient finding that neuroses drove people to the left, or other comparativists in the 50s and 60s presenting a development model (modernization) in which the so-called third world would have to replicate an idealized version of US history in order to develop properly. We're best when we look back, analyze the past, and when we argue about how we should organize, distribute, and use power. Past American Political Science Association presidents, Ted Lowi in the 70s and Ira Katznelson recently, have warned us about the perils of getting "the king's ear." We should keep their warnings in mind (just ask Larry Diamond--who briefly attempted to work with the Bush Administration in trying to foster orderly democratization in Iraq).
Political scientists, manipulating economic markets? Would that be deregulators, like Senator Phil Gramm? Neocons in the last Bush Administration, cutting government oversight? Feith et al telling us Iraq had so much oil, it would pay us back for our invasion and occupation?
Econimists didn't miss the financial bubble--they saw it as a way to make money, just like under the Savings and Loan era. They just didn't see it as a destructive way to make money, that's all.
And beware the political person who talks about,"strategic importance to U.S. national security policy." That's how we create the Carter Doctrine, going to war over oil, b/c controlling cheap energy is America's stategic policy. Its how we force countries to pay off their loans by opening up their markets to our cheaper products, which their local companies cannot compete against.
Economists tend to analyse Social Policy issue within the framework of economic markets only. Most of the Economists fail to appreciate other policy markets (social and political institutions). The true social policy represents an equilibrium among the economic, social and political markets spheres. Each one of these markets individually represents a subset of policy space,and policy making devoid of all three facets of market transactions will never be an efficient outcome (Paretian or Kaldor Hicks outcome). All branches of Knowledge help us to comprehend the life and its complexities: it would be niaive to belive that one disciplince will yield a perfect answer. Life is complex and a coherent policy can only be derived through interplay of various disciplines.
Economics was originally referred to as political economy. Past scientists publishing in the field ranged from Adam Smith and J.A. Hobson to Karl Marx and later John Maynard Keynes. Economics was understood to be directly impacted by politics and vice versa--a dynamic interactive system. As a student of economics, I have experienced the influx of students from a range of other disciplines with the recent economic turmoil. One of the most annoying such students can be the P.S. major. These students are intelligent and well-informed relating to current situations but often lack objective, logical reasoning within their positions. They regularly assert moral arguments without factual, pragmatic bases. I also am an idealist, however as pyschology is my other field of study, I know that one needs factual knowledge to truly institute change. The study of economics affords a much more scientific approach to understanding our truly complex and diverse world.
You've got it backwards. It was the political scientists, manipulating the markets they didn't understand, that were a if not the major cause of the current crisis: regulations requiring banks to lend to riskier customers as if they weren't as risky likely caused the subprime loan mess, for instance. For another, it was those same policies you denigrate that let people have money to lose in the bubbles; the sort of thinking this commentary advocates led to "stagflation." Political science is at least as woolly a discipline as economics, and both, like all politically-relevant fields, have entirely too many dishonest researchers.
