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Why is social science so late to the science party?
Our ancestors thousands of years ago knew that if they really wanted to understand the heavens, they would have to sit down and carefully count some things. By a few centuries ago, such painstaking efforts had yielded an impressive understanding of dozens of other subjects. By the twentieth century, the virtues of counting to understand would seem to have long been established.
Ordinary people are far more interested in the social world around them than they are in most of the arcane topics to which counting was first applied. And yet, social science didn't really start to count in ernest until the twentieth century. Why? Here are some possible theories:
- We thought we already understood the social world as well as we needed.
- Social science is just very hard - simple counting yields far fewer useful insights than in other fields. So social counting had to wait until we could do it on a massive scale.
- The subject was taboo because we thought that a better social science would mainly just let some people take more advantage of others - there were few net benefits.
- We held strong opinions on social topics, but at some level knew many of them to be false. Social science was taboo for fear of confronting our self-deceptions about the social world.
I lean toward #4. Comments are open.
Posted by Robin Hanson on November 4, 2005 at 08:00 AM in Economics, History, Science | Permalink
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Comments
Are you saying that political correctness is older than social science? That can't be right (but is what #4 essentially says). I go with #2 and the added fact that it took awhile to realize that counting produces "some" real insights, i.e. you can only get so far with philosophizing and waving of hands. In the science-sciences the same realization took place much earlier.
Posted by: Moooo at Nov 4, 2005 8:43:14 AM
#5 Religion does a better job of explaining Human behavior and interaction the the physical world.
Posted by: Jason at Nov 4, 2005 8:49:55 AM
I'm inclined to #2 as well. As any historian knows, it's devilishly hard to get *any* useful quantitative measures of a demographic or social-statistics nature prior to the 20th century. Ben Wattenberg even called the 20th century "the first measured century"!
One of the real treasures of our country's government is the census data and the associated pubs, that go back to the early 19th century: the census bureau has even gone to the trouble of reprinting (in PDF form) the "Statistical Abstracts" going all the way back to the beginning...wow!
Posted by: David Hecht at Nov 4, 2005 8:51:22 AM
I agree that #4 is contributory, and certainly explains why quantitative social science would be met with resistance in the past (and is still met with resistance today), but it does not explain why it had no presence at all. It would only take a few curious geniuses, of which human history has many, to ignore the taboo and delve into quantitative social science. Social behavior was just too complex to apply quantitive methods to and glean useful insights from, and everyone knew it. Before we could count on a massive scale, and had the mathematical techniques to analyze such massive statistical data, it was all praxeology.
Posted by: Zac Gochenour at Nov 4, 2005 8:56:04 AM
Learning. The 3rd loop. :-)
Means, dispersions and variances are interesting for natural phenomena because they don't change qualitatively but only quantitatively. If we take a large enough sample and propose various functions, we're sure to end up with a good fitting; good for forecasting.
The problem with learning systems is that they vary not only their qualitative structure (the value of the parameters of the model) but also the functions of the model itself... trying to fit a function (e.g. with a minimum sum of squared distances from the function to the samples) makes no sense if there is no underlying function we want to discover.
People learn. And then everything goes meta. Consider Rothbard's forecasting paradox: if I "catch" human behavior is a model, and it tells me when the market will peak, then this science would be used by a lot of people to delay/hurry their sales... therefore the peak will change because of our actions... and so on.
If a constant of human behaviour is public knowledge, some people will try to exploit it and, more importantly, other/most people will learn from it and change their behavior.
Posted by: Gabriel Mihalache at Nov 4, 2005 9:02:24 AM
Fear of numbers seems to be a popular theme these days.
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleID.18819/article_detail.asp
Elites have reason to fear numbers in social policy, because the downside is much greater than the upside. I vote 4.
Posted by: JC at Nov 4, 2005 9:02:47 AM
Broadly speaking I think Confucious was social science. I'm not sure if he counted things though. Probably someone in China did. I do seem to remember that the first-ever use of statisitcs were births and deaths in London ... maybe I'm on the wrong vibe (and a layman to boot) but when I read Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk some of the history seemd "social."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0471295639/102-8546628-9060923
Posted by: odograph at Nov 4, 2005 9:19:39 AM
#1, #3, and #4 are a bit rude to people like Smith, Marx, Locke, Colbert, and others who made major contributions to social science before the 20th century.
I think a better answer with much more historical and modern-day support is #6: the study of economics, business, and of sociology/psychology of anyone but royalty have long been considered to be ignoble, "grubby" pursuits that required thinking about the "wrong" sort of people.
Since ancient Babylon, astronomy, theology, and poetry have been considered to be noble pursuits fit for kings and people of leisure. However, even today you can find many physics and literature PhD's who think of economics and real-world business as beneath their dignity. And in Smith and Locke's era, people like Alexander Pope were writing poems about Newton, not about early social scientists.
Posted by: DK at Nov 4, 2005 9:50:58 AM
Definitely #2. In fact, I would say that #2 is still an issue, and it is still difficult to get definitive results out of social sciences. We're making improvements, but we're not nearly to the point where we can be as rigorous as "hard" sciences.
Also, whenever a scientific result comes out that offends some group of people, it gets squashed or heavily attacked. Which is, I guess a variation on #4.
Posted by: jb at Nov 4, 2005 10:12:55 AM
It seems to me that #4 and #2 would both have to be at work. People don't really want to find out that their cherished beliefs are wrong, but if there was some really strong competitive advantage to groups that were willing to look reality in the face, at least some groups would do so. But until recently it had not been demonstrated that this stuff was useful, so no one had to confront the dilemma. The key question for the future (as Bryan Caplan has pointed out) is whether there is some necessary relationship between an openness to seeing the world as it really is and a pro-liberty outlook. If yes, then the future looks bright: the most successful societies and the most liberal will be the same ones. If no, then we are in big trouble.
Posted by: David J. Balan at Nov 4, 2005 10:14:01 AM
It seems a little silly to ask people what their opinions are on this when you could do an empirical study...
Posted by: paul at Nov 4, 2005 10:16:03 AM
#2, with a big dose of DK's #6.
There are still a lot of questions and issues in social science that are difficult to study quantitatively, or simply better studied more quantitatively. There are lots of people -- a good subject for statistics -- but there are fewer large organizations, governments, or kings. Many questions in social science, even today, concern questions that are better studied structurally or historically, and as DK suggests, the questions that can be better studied quantatively were less respectable in the past.
Another big factor is the development of more sophisticated statistical techniques, which mostly occurred in the 20th century, which made counting things more valuable. I don't know how recent the ability to calculate and understand "statistical significance" is, but without it, counting things is much less scientific than we now think of it.
Posted by: Alex R at Nov 4, 2005 10:19:54 AM
Oops, I meant better studied more qualitatively...
Posted by: Alex R at Nov 4, 2005 10:23:39 AM
I would argue against the usefulness of the "counting" analogy. Counting (data collection) is descriptive, not predictive, so it is of relatively little worth by itself. Science is valuable because it is based on testable hypotheses. Hypotheses are much easier to test in the physical sciences, where variables can be investigated independently. In the social sciences, it is difficult to dinstinguish correlation and causation, and in many cases it's hard to run control experiments.
Since they are based on extremely complex systems (people), problems in social science are extremely complex. Laws in social science cannot be as precisely descriptive as those in physical science. More laws are required in social science to describe fewer phenomena.
Which seems more likely, a mass self-deception, or the fact that more difficult problems need to be addressed with more sophisticated techniques? I would expect Robin, more than anyone else, to believe that information, whether about price or about social science, finds its way to market with remarkable efficiency.
Posted by: Paul N at Nov 4, 2005 10:47:16 AM
There's a number 5 here, or are we up to 8? There are technology issues that we are just getting around to overcoming - the technology wasn't there until recently to collect the statistically valid data that's accurate and useful (what was life like before telephone polling?). And the technology we have developed still isn't as accurate as the natural sciences - our census data is still for the most part averages and estimations. Polling, while useful, only goes so far, loses value just days/weeks after the poll has been completed, and can turn out to be dead wrong. And, the data that is collected isn't necessarily true or truthful - people lie all the time in polls and surveys. Beliefs, values, behaviors, etc., are just very difficult to quantify and the data is really hard to capture. It's a very different kind of science.
Posted by: Anna L at Nov 4, 2005 10:52:01 AM
According to Robert Trivers, it may be due to a trait for self-deception. He touches on the matter of relative developments of intellectual disciplines in the conclusion to his paper The elements of a scientific theory of self-deception which can be found with google.
Posted by: Daniel Fogelholm at Nov 4, 2005 11:05:38 AM
I'll vote for #2, and for jb's addition. Social systems are full of feedback loops, some positive and some negative, some large and some small, with wildly varying differences in the time lags. Even with the best of modern statistical technique, we tend to be measuring the reactions at specific points in the loops, rather than describing the loops themselves.
Posted by: Michael Cain at Nov 4, 2005 11:54:05 AM
I prefer a Durkheimian explanation: it was only under an advanced capitalism that social relations became abstracted enough (i.e. where division of labor lead to plenty of social relations that were anonymous, semi-anonymous or based in market relations)so that "society" became a meaningful object of study. The rise of the modern nation-state, too, undoubtedly contributed: c.f the the increasing use of statistics in late 19th century Western nations to administer their populations. In fact, I'm curious why the four possibilities listed about don't even countenance a sociological or historical explanation!
Posted by: Chris Cagle at Nov 4, 2005 12:00:02 PM
Can we really say that Smith, Marx, Locke, and Colbert were really "social scientists"? They came up with excellent theories, but did not have much access to hard data to back them up.
It isn't science until you collect the facts and show they support your hypothesis. Until then, you are doing speculation.
Posted by: Mr. Econotarian at Nov 4, 2005 12:00:40 PM
Number two certainly, and also a version of #4. Those at the top of a social structure are usually happy with it the way it is, and have invented various rationales for why it is right and just. They are, in general, not interested in further exploration. They also have considerable power to promote or discourage various kinds of intellectual pursuits.
Posted by: Bernard Yomtov at Nov 4, 2005 12:01:21 PM
There's a lot of #2, with a caveat of #7(?), that science itself wasn't all that consistent at the counting/quantifying thing until late in the 19th century. You can point to counter examples, but mainly because so many of the counter counter examples have disappeared because they're bleeding useless.
I would also argue that, outside of economics, there's not a lot of good science going on in social science. Political science in particular is filled with people who think they're doing science but despite endless (mis)readings of Kuhn and Popper, don't funadamentally have good scientific literacy. They don't really understand the process and aren't willing to accept that there are only certain questions that can be answered in the absence of controlled, double-blind experiments.
Pedagogy only woke up to this fact within the past ten years. Psychology is doing much better. I'm not as familiar with anthropology, but I haven't seen anything to make me suspect they're much ahead of the game.
Posted by: Sandy at Nov 4, 2005 12:07:34 PM
I would argue for a bit of of 4 (especially for psychology), a bit of 5 (Adam Smith, David Hume etc did social science and Smith used extensive data. In fact, most economics doesn't require data and is essentially fun with math and history) and lots of 7 (or whatever we are up to)
7 Large scale science, social or not essentially depends on a different scientific method from small scale science, as it is a more inherently social enterprise. Don't believe Gallileo? OK, just try doing what he did. Don't believe Einstein? There are still simple ways to test results. But what if you don't believe studies showing that such and such causes cancer? What if you don't believe that the inflation statistics? What can you realistically do about it? Real (small) science thrives on criticism. Like a living thing, it is fault tolerant. Big science is more like a computer. It doesn't work without incredibly reliable component scientists, but its existance undermines the methods by which such scientists can be identified.
In general, statistical science, because of the issues of fraud or poor work, has to discard data outliers. Unfortunately, it is by looking at unexpected data, outliers, that deeper insights into a phenomenon are generally discovered, as in the modern physics revolution. If only a few people will offer data which conflict with the consensus at a time, and these datum are dropped as outliers, how do you expect progress?
The more I learn the closer I come to philosophical skepticism with respect to statistical data. In most situations I'm not convinced the results of large-scale statistical study of reasonably subtle phenomena are better sources of data than rumor or general impression.
Maybe if we had real insurance comanies instead of the regulated mess we have this would change.
Posted by: michael vassar at Nov 4, 2005 12:14:51 PM
I think the Rutherford explanation is best: people with orderly, organized minds are naturally drawn to pursuits in which order is more apparent like physics, chemistry, and mathematics. They further are inclined to impose their own internal order on these exterior studies.
This isn't to say that there aren't social scientists with orderly, organized minds. But not only are their disciplines messier but there's years of accumulated mess from those who don't have orderly, organized minds imposing their own internal disorder on already-complex phenomena.
Posted by: Dave Schuler at Nov 4, 2005 12:18:18 PM
No. 1, surely.
The layperson has got the whole economy figured out, no? Gas prices are hurting me, oil companies are on a roll, they must be gouging me! I just lost my job to that swarthy Indian in Bangalore, to hell with globalization! Stupid Becker and his theories, of course I crooks do their thing because they're evil! And so on and so forth. The immediacy of social life becomes a temptation to generalize one's prejudices over the whole. Then smart people like Hume, Smith, and so on began to transcend these common sense observations towards a more abstract, less parochial, and less credulous form of analysis. The rest is history.
Posted by: Roehl Briones at Nov 4, 2005 12:27:26 PM
Mr. Econotarian et al:
If you read Smith, Marx, etc., you will find they contain a lot of facts. Both began with historical and direct observations, and are generally considered today to have been very astute observers of their times. Which is one reason why many of their theories are widely accepted today.
But I don't want to start an argument about what makes a scientist -- I largely just meant that Smith, Marx, et al are evidence against #1 and #4. They are clear evidence that yes, before the 20th century, serious people were trying to understand how the social world worked, and they were actually thinking rather than avoiding topics that might challenge self-deception.
What I really hate here is the idea that past generations were just all suffering "self-deception" compared to us enlightened moderns. IMHO, a lot of people have forgotten that the very idea that we could be "self-deceived" and that we might benefit from experimental evidence stems largely from the work of Decartes and other pre-20th century philosophers who created the foundation of modern science. People such as Smith and Marx should not be lumped into the Dark Ages of self deception next to the medieval Aristotleans.
Posted by: DK at Nov 4, 2005 12:44:05 PM
