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A plea for more anthropology of ideology
I've been pondering Daniel Davies's attempted takedown of Milton Friedman, or for that matter Jon Chait's book on supply side economics, and so I slip beneath the fold...
What strikes me is that these writers, and also their counterparts on the Right, see so little need to adduce anthropological evidence to characterize other people's views. When it concerns the Laffer Curve, or global warming, or the correct measure of civilian deaths in Iraq, the concern is for the highest standards of evidence. Yet the question of what other people "really believe" also can be treated in more or less sophisticated form, most of all with the tools of anthropology. Web quotations are relevant, but there is no substitute for getting out there and speaking to those people, for a start.
I'd like to propose a new research convention. Anytime a writer or blogger talks about what The Right or The Left (or some subset thereof) really wants or means, I'd like them to list their personal anthropological experience with the subjects under consideration. Davies presents Friedman as a shill for the Republican Party; I'd like to know how many (public or non-public) conversations he has had with Friedman about the topic of the Republican Party. I've been present for a few, and while I'm open to feedback from Davies, my guess reading his post is that he hasn't been there for any. Yet he writes with a tone of certitude: "it's clearly not intellectual honesty that makes American liberals act pretend that Milton Friedman wasn't a party line Republican hack."
Is it really true that "The ideological core of Chicago-style libertarianism has two planks. 1. Vote Republican. 2. That's it."? And Davies's own quotation of Milton Friedman does not support his core claims; he simply asks us to believe that Friedman is lying. I would ask Davies to apply the same standards of argumentation and evidence that he does to the Lancet study of Iraq or the many other topics he has written excellent blog posts about.
How many supply-siders has Chait talked to? It might be a lot, but again I'd like to know. Has he met with the people who write The Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page? How many of them? How many leading Republican donors and strategists does he know? Did they really chat with him, or were they in controlled "interview mode"? How motivated are they by supply-side doctrine? What did those say who weren't so motivated?
How many intelligent pro-life Republicans do you know? How many southern racist Republicans do you know? Have they confided in you? Do they trust you? Do you really think you know what they believe?
I don't mean to suggest that such anthropological research will always yield sanitizing answers. Nor do I believe that the Left is worse in ignoring the anthropology of ideology than is the Right.
It is sad that anthropological research has such a low status among so many smart people. It is fashionable to open up data sets for replication. So let's do the same for research into ideology or even just proclamations about the ideology of others, especially those you disagree with. Tell us how much field work you did, who you did it with, how much they trusted you, and what you wish you could have done but didn't. That is easy enough in the on-line world.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on November 29, 2007 at 10:36 AM in Education | Permalink
Comments
My god! If Milton Friedman was able to argue that simply, persuasively, and logically about things he believed false; then he is a far greater genius than any of us could have imagined.
Posted by: josh at Nov 29, 2007 10:58:44 AM
Who the hell is Daniel Davies and why should you or I care what he says? Would anyone taking a contrary view want to sit down and discuss the issue with an obviously biased and hot-tempered person? I can easily find more interesting insults on many other left-wing blogs, or from some of my friends and neighbors.
Posted by: Rich Berger at Nov 29, 2007 11:05:56 AM
Yes. In the case of Milton Friedman, simply reading his two most famous popular works or watching one of the numerous interviews on YouTube should be enough to challenge the Republican hack theory of the man. It seems kind of obvious that if you're going to write a book bashing a very highly respected economist, you should want to collect evidence of his hackery. If you don't, aren't you yourself committing a hack?
Posted by: CT at Nov 29, 2007 11:07:43 AM
I think what you are proposing is a great idea.
All the GMU economic bloggers should set an example by following the guidelines you propose when they discuss political/economic philosophies they disagree with.
Posted by: spencer at Nov 29, 2007 11:18:11 AM
I agree with Rich Berger. After reading Daniel Davies' post, I will purposefully avoid everything else he has written or will write. Anyone whose thoughts are warped enough to churn out a post as poorly considered and poorly argued as his cannot be taken seriously. It may take a lot of writing to garner a high level of intellectual respect, but it can only take one post to lose it. He lost it.
Posted by: Ryan at Nov 29, 2007 11:25:02 AM
Yep, begging the question by assuming the worst of somebody, and thus finding it, is a serious methodological flaw.
Posted by: Luis Enrique at Nov 29, 2007 11:27:04 AM
It feels more like he trolled the everliving christ out of some people.
Posted by: perianwyr at Nov 29, 2007 11:30:18 AM
Easily one of your best posts.
Posted by: Rue Des Quatre Vents at Nov 29, 2007 11:31:39 AM
Rich - Because he's smart and consistently entertaining.
CT - I think you're confusing Davies (who wrote a blog post about a famous economist) and Chait (who wrote a book about supply-side ideology).
Posted by: washerdreyer at Nov 29, 2007 11:36:59 AM
mind you, I suppose assuming the best in everybody and thus finding it, is too.
washerdreyer, seconded.
Posted by: Luis Enrique at Nov 29, 2007 11:43:03 AM
An interesting idea, Tyler, but isn't there the very real chance that we end up promoting anecdotes and gut feelings over the things that people actually say to the public? After all, the primary way that people in political circles matter is by either voting a specific way, when they have the power, or influencing the public. All of that is more or less open to view without anthropological evidence. (None of this is meant to comment on your disapprobation for the Daniel Davies post, just the general proposal).
Posted by: Justin at Nov 29, 2007 11:44:55 AM
I agree with your point, but there is at least a modicum of irony here in that you are in some sense arguing in defense of Friedman with the opposite of what the progenitor of "as-if" methodological inquiry proposed in 1953. His own motivation doesn't matter --- it is only the congruence with d-squared's observations that matter. (I mean this in jest, of course.)
Posted by: Jonathan at Nov 29, 2007 11:47:49 AM
Great posting.
Wasn't/isn't Krugman guilty of this kind of thing all the time too? I remember how his wrap-up about Milton Friedman included some references to Friedman's supposed "intellectual dishonesty." Woulda been nice if he'd raised his points (whatever they were) to Friedman's face when the guy was still around to respond to him.
So maybe sometimes cowardice plays a role in the way people carry on like this?
Posted by: Micheal Blowhard at Nov 29, 2007 11:49:12 AM
Hmmm, perhaps my email is broken, because I would have thought that before writing this, Tyler might have taken the trouble to find out whether I was partly joking, or writing polemically, or whether I meant that post to be taken as 100% representative of my final, considered view of Milton Friedman.
Of course, if the view is that I wrote what I wrote and have to live with it, then the same is true for Milton Friedman. Whatever he thought, said or expressed, he signed that letter in support of Bush fiscal policy, and he *must* have known, *while he was doing so* that he was signing his name to something that wasn't true.
Posted by: dsquared at Nov 29, 2007 12:04:32 PM
I think Jonathan's comment hits the nail on the head. It seems that TC's suggestion is the kind of "Why not just ask the dolphins?" approach to human behaviour that economists (and most of all Milton Friedman himself) are rightly suspicious of.
Posted by: Ben at Nov 29, 2007 12:06:20 PM
[Davies presents Friedman as a shill for the Republican Party]
By the way, it's not a matter of me "presenting him". He did, in fact, prevaricate and obfuscate over the Patriot Act. He did, in fact, sign the 2004 economists' letter in support of the Bush fiscal policy. Those are actual facts, and that's what I stuck to. If you can find anything in that post where I even speculate about what Milton Friedman believed in his heart of hearts, I will edit it. But the actual facts of the matter are that consistently (and I could dig up more examples if they were needed), when Milton Friedman was put in a situation where saying what he thought would be electorally damaging to the Republican Party, it was the Republicans which won, repeatedly.. That's bad when Communists do it, and it's bad when anyone else does.
I am not signing up for this soft moral-relativist "you can't judge them, it's their culture" approach. I am in favour of objective standards on this one.
Posted by: dsquared at Nov 29, 2007 12:11:51 PM
Dsquared:
"Tyler might have taken the trouble to find out whether I was partly joking, or writing polemically, or whether I meant that post to be taken as 100% representative of my final, considered view of Milton Friedman."
How the hell do you want it to be taken? As 73% representative?
"They're always hacks, Brad. Always. Yes even Milton Friedman."
"I wouldn't mind, but it's clearly not intellectual honesty that makes American liberals act pretend that Milton Friedman wasn't a party line Republican hack (which he was;"
Oh I get it. Your partly joking. That's partly hilarious. By the way, this comment should only be taken as 34.6% of my representitive beliefs.
Posted by: josh at Nov 29, 2007 12:11:53 PM
Why do intentions matter? Why not argue with empirical results, or with methodology, or use logic to argue with the model in question?
In my opinion this is the single biggest failing with those on the economic Left in general, as well as some other folks. I could care less whether it is someone's intent to help someone else or whether it is a byproduct of a selfish act (cue Adam Smith's invisible hand). I care tremendously whether or not their actions actually help, or if they hurt, the individual(s) in question.
Posted by: happyjuggler0 at Nov 29, 2007 12:13:14 PM
Strange that we've settled on this equilibrium considering it would seem to make arguments far more convincing if we followed Tyler's suggestion.
I find myself naturally wanting to defend Southern Christian conservatives when I hear them criticized--not because I necessarily agree with them, but because I grew up with them and know them well enough to appreciate the nuances in their views, so the evidently ill-informed caricatures bother me. At the same time, this personal (or anthropological) knowledge would allow me to make far more rigorous and persuasive arguments against them if I so chose.
Good post.
Posted by: Jeff H. at Nov 29, 2007 12:14:39 PM
a dozen some attempted take-downs of d^2s post, and noone has really bothered to respond to his point.
Posted by: yoyo at Nov 29, 2007 12:19:51 PM
"If you can find anything in that post where I even speculate about what Milton Friedman believed in his heart of hearts, I will edit it."
"when Milton Friedman was put in a situation where saying what he thought would be electorally damaging to the Republican Party, it was the Republicans which won, repeatedly.."
That was easy. You provided it one sentence below.
Posted by: josh at Nov 29, 2007 12:29:26 PM
Well no, Josh. You haven't read that right. Given that you've also not understood the phrase "100% representative of my views", I think you're not actually making much of an effort.
Posted by: dsquared at Nov 29, 2007 12:31:54 PM
"a dozen some attempted take-downs of d^2s post, and noone has really bothered to respond to his point."
Wasn't his point that Friedman is always a hack?
Posted by: Sebastian Holsclaw at Nov 29, 2007 12:39:47 PM
Yoyo, why must we respond to Davies' points when we can all refer to the many books and papers that Dr. Friedman wrote to find out what he believed.
There was no Friedman party. He didn't have the option to vote or support his true beliefs in politics, and he, like all of us, was/is forced to vote for the percieved best option, or lesser of two evils if you prefer. I'm not willing to condemn Friedman, or anyone else for that matter, for supporting one party over another. If the best evidence Davies' has of Friedman's shilling for the republicans is that he supported tax cuts and a fiscal policy he had no hand in executing, then I think he needs to dig a bit deeper.
Posted by: Ryan at Nov 29, 2007 12:43:44 PM
Unless you're psychic, there are two ways you could know what he thought:
a) he said it.
b) you're speculating
If he didn't say it, you're speculating about what he believed in his heart of hearts, aren't you?
What are people supposed to do with the knowledge that your post is not 100% representative of your views? We don't even know you.
Posted by: josh at Nov 29, 2007 12:44:15 PM
