The Big Picture

In Canada.com (via Arts & Letters Daily), The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber questions whether the phenomenal success of Steven D. Levitt’s Freakonomics has had the undesirable effect of turning especially new economists away from the serious business of, well, economics. Solving the problem of productivity growth, Scheiber suggests, is rather more pressing business than, say, cheating in Sumo Wrestling or game show racial discrimination; and he has a point, though probably not nearly as big a point as the comparison suggests.

First, however bright Levitt is (very) or successful Freakonomics has been (very, very), it surely won’t do to lay the blame (or credit) for this fairly minor and small-scale shift in the attention of some economists to his feet, alone. In terms of popular economics writing, for example, Steven E. Landsburg’s The Armchair Economist, less successful in terms of sales than Levitt’s book but in other ways superior, was published in 1993. Moreover, economists have been churning out cross-discipline academic papers for decades now, possibly the best example being the hundreds if not thousands of papers on law and economics.

Still, Levitt is the current poster child for that tiny fraction of working economists whose work is both intelligible and interesting to the average layman, and Scheiber would have a hard time making a convincing case that making economics more interesting to the general population is a bad thing. Among professional economists, on the other hand, at least the ones of my acquaintance, economics remains for the most part the mind-numbing process of mathematical analysis that justifies it being called, if not quite science, surely dismal, nonetheless.

As is the case with all academic disciplines, economics is, at bottom, simply what economists do, whatever that may be. As is also the case throughout academia, what the rest of us understand about what they do is a function of how well they teach their own discipline. Here, it must be said, economists typically do not earn high marks, at least not if the average undergraduate’s understanding of economics after an introductory course in microeconomics and macroeconomics is any indication. Such students fall into three broad categories in decreasing likelihood of results: those who don’t get it at all, those who master the rudimentary mechanics and a sort of disjunctive grasp of some of the basic concepts and those who get the Big Picture. Since it is the objective of all introductory survey courses to give the Big Picture (the myriad exceptions and qualifications are for later), these results are not very encouraging, though they do go toward explaining why, for example, so many journalists possessed of elite university diplomas write so obliviously about economic matters.

It is possible, of course, to get the Big Picture without a command of the mechanics or many of the underlying concepts of economics. That, after all, is what Adam Smith managed, though I suspect his grasp of mathematics was no better than mine and he was never once required to distinguish between a change in demand and a change in quantity demanded. It is much more likely, however, for the average undergraduate to be able to answer such questions and sketch out his little demand curve charts and explain how Gross Domestic Product or the money supply is calculated and so forth without ever once grasping how powerful and broadly applicable the underlying concepts of price theory, marginal utility and such truly are.

Which is exactly where the Landsburgs and Levitts come in. Maybe Levitt is wrong about the relationship between abortion and crime, but whether he is wrong or right in the particulars, showing that economic insights are useful in addressing such matters is, itself, enormously valuable. Are such efforts good economics? That’s none of my business; the academics can sort such questions out in their own little free market.

On a different blog several years ago I made some offhand comment about teaching philosophy to undergraduates, unintentionally suggesting that the objective was to turn them into philosophers. A professor of philosophy responded (with alacrity) that this certainly was not the objective of undergraduate instruction in philosophy but of graduate school. He was, of course, correct if and insofar as one defines a philosopher as someone possessed of a PhD who earns his living parsing philosophical concepts at the subatomic level. So, too, an undergraduate degree in economics does not a professional economist make or a B.S. in physics a physicist, etc. But what about the rest of us?

I am (old enough to be) reminded of Don Herbert and of the various teachers and writers I have encountered over the years whose ability to show me, despite my ignorance of the details of their disciplines, the Big Picture – the central insight that, once grasped, transforms forever how, for example, one looks at questions of free will and responsibility or the structure of the physical universe or a painting or piece of music or how we go about our daily lives dealing with limited resources and unlimited wants and the unintended consequences of our decisions. God is in the Big Picture, even if the Devil is in the details.