Deirdre Nansen McCloskey - Bettering Humanomics: A New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science

DEIRDRE NANSEN MCCLOSKEY

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2021 by The University of Chicago

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Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN -13: 978-0-226-76592-1 (cloth)

ISBN -13: 978-0-226-76608-9 (e-book)

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226766089.001.0001

Chapter 5 originally published as One More Step: An Agreeable Reply to Whaples in Historically Speaking 11, no. 2 (2010): 2223. 2010 The Historical Society. Reprinted with the permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McCloskey, Deirdre N., author.

Title: Bettering humanomics : a new, and old, approach to economic science / Deirdre Nansen McCloskey.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020048862 | ISBN 9780226765921 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226766089 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: EconomicsPhilosophy. | EconomicsMoral and ethical aspects. | EconomicsSociological aspects.

Classification: LCC HB 72. M 329 2021 | DDC 330dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048862

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z 39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

The elevator pitch is that to get a better economic science we need humanomics, which uses broader yet still rigorous theorizing and broader yet more serious empiricism than at present. And we need, as ethical social scientists, to be rigorously modest.

During the 1980s and 1990s, as a middle-aged professor of economics, I wrote three books on method, saying that economics, like other sciencesand like the rest of the life of a speaking specieshas a rhetoric. That is, economics uses metaphors (The Rhetoric of Economics, 1985), stories (If Youre So Smart, 1990), and epistemologies (Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics, 1994b). The books urged economists to become aware of their rhetoric if they wanted a grown-up science.

I dont claim that the books had much effect on my beloved colleagues. The economists, orthodox or not, carried on, bless em, with a positivism, behaviorism, and neoinstitutionalism in happy ignorance of the metaphors, stories, and epistemologies they use daily in their science.

So now in two books, this one and its forthcoming critical companion, Beyond Behaviorism, Positivism, and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics, I go further, to the substantive object, so to speak, of economic science. The economy itself has a rhetoric. The trilogy of earlier books was by contrast about the form of economic science. (I say this to the [small] extent that an elderly emerita professor of economics, of history, of communications, and of English can believe that form and substance are strictly separable.)

A technical book with Stephen Ziliak in 2008, The Cult of Statistical Significance, straddles the form and substance more explicitly. Its theme has recently been echoed by the American Statistical Association. The original articulation was as old as statistical theory itself. But its echo has not yet reached economists. (Science is of course conservative, and should be. Perhaps, though, the economists stoutly ignoring the common sense of statistical practice are taking conservation of old habits a bit too far.)

The ethics of liberalism, born in the eighteenth century, is part of humanomics. Liberalism is a foundational discipline for all the modern sciences, natural or social or humanistic. Its not an accident that science has flourished most in the more liberal societies, from ancient Athens to the modern Untied States. Good sciencegood social science most obviouslyis made by good, honest, open-minded, liberal people, or else it is likely to break bad. Such a conclusion was sketched back in 1994 in Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics, and I finally got the politics of it more or less straight, I suppose, a quarter of a century later in Why Liberalism Works (2019). (I am not the swiftest of thinkers.) Clearly a bad, illiberal social engineering enables the tyrant to push people around. It breaks bad in every way. Therefore I argue in the other book of the present pair that Northian neoinstitutionalism, like the other antiethical, positivist, neobehaviorist, and illiberal movements over the past decades in economics, doesnt fit the bill for an ethical and persuasive economics for a free people.

Much of what I say here began as responses to invitations to sound off. Responding, understand, is not merely irritated disputation or somehow impolite. Its the only alternative to a frozen and unproductive hierarchy in science of the sort that prevented for fifty years American geologists from believing in the movement of continents, prevented for thirty years Mayanists from decoding glyphs, and prevented for twenty years economists from challenging Keynesianism. Responding is what should be done by scientistsor by citizens or lawyers or marriage partnersevery time, as amiably as they can manage. Whats your thought? Oh, I see. Hmm. Well, dear, heres my considered, and loving, response to your logic and your evidence, your feelings and your dignity. Maybe we can make your own thought bettercertainly mine, for I readily admit that mine may be mistaken. Lets look into it. You come too. Its the human conversation of a good science, and it is why groups of loving friends in science and scholarship can criticize each other so productively. So, as you can see still more in the other book of the pair, I went to it with a will. (Youre welcome.)

We should all try to follow the motto expressed by the philosopher Amlie Oksenberg Rorty, who wrote in 1983 that what is crucial is our ability to engage in continuous conversation, testing one another, discovering our hidden pre-suppositions, changing our minds because we have listened to the voices of our fellows. Lunatics also change their minds, but their minds change with the tides of the moon and not because they have listened, really listened, to their friends questions and objections. The triad is how science advances, really advances, whether on little matters such as an econometric coefficient or on world-shaping matters such as the big claims by Newton or Darwin or Marx or Keynes. The procedure is to listen, discovering the form of the argument, then use rhetorical and philosophical discernment to find out whats mistaken in the earlier science. Fix it. In 1867 the subtitle of Marxs Capital was A Critique of Political Economy. Thats the scientific spirit.

The discoveries I have made by responding critically, yet as amiably as I could manage, are two:

1. 1. There seems to be emerging a new and I think more serious and sensible way of doing economic sciencequantitatively serious, philosophically serious, historically serious, and ethically serious, too, as I argue in this volume. The economist Bart Wilson and a few others nowadays call it the humanomics, as in the title here.