"You have to learn your instruments. Then you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the band-stand, forget all that and just play." (Charlie Parker)
Michael Sandel, world-famous for the course on justice, in this video joins those who have pointed out to the heady nature of the contemporary (or the old?) economics.* Herbert Gintis, member of the earlier extra-ordinary department of economics at Amherst, gets an impression that Sandel treats economics (and economists) in a sweeping manner. Sandel's book is told to give an impression that "economics is not worth studying because it is incurably ideological and incapable of dealing with contemporary social policy issues". In this way, it would not be worth to study the instruments of economics - let alone to sit in one of those introductory classes, standardized by Paul Samuelson, but taken much elsewhere by Greg Mankiw, listening to the persuasive delivery of its conclusions. However, to illustrate that economics is elsewhere than Sandel puts it, Gintis gives examples of work by Ernst Fehr and Acemoglu.
The field of economics has gotten
intensely empirical over the last (decade). There
are other interesting developments. Still, I believe
there is currently no discipline, while studying of which one should be more selective, wary, and indeed interdisciplinary, if she doesn't want it to screw her up. By this I refer to either
(1) make you more likely to: choose less cooperative strategies, take bribes, be less generous (perhaps symptomatically, I don't even think of the last as of a vice),** or
(2) make you spend life by intellectual masturbation, instead of doing something as wild as actual problem-solving:
Aware of Sen's Rational Fools,
blatantly indiscriminating in the use of utility theory; despite my laziness; I have noticed useful applications of rational choice such the use of game theory in understanding strategic behavior. What struck me as hidebound scholasticism, however,
is Garry Becker's Theory of Marriage, one of the works for which he was awarded with the Nobel Prize of 1992. After reading first couple of pages, I came to an inchoate feeling that I could substitute the term "marriage" for "political science" in Ian Shapiro's book and ask:
Has this theoretical apparatus contributed to the stock of knowledge about [marriage]? ... [V]ery little has been learned by way of nonobvious propositions that withstand empirical scrutiny (p.52)
I was not born to create 'social-scientific' theories. I will use this liberty to let myself loose, while I ask you to tell me what do I miss, that is, how was the originality of this nonsense useful.
My personal-favourite dichotomy for relationships is the following: one category of people, Pears, are in a relationship as means to get belonging, save some money, have children. Another category, Apples, take family, money, belonging as means to an end, which ultimately is the relationship itself. Apples feel like some non-material value added originates in between them, rather than from each of them, together.*** The latter category is much less prone, if at all, to be casted in any rationalistic theory concerning marriage, absent of Weberian notion of peoples' self-understandings.
Becker's Theory of Marriage
Becker's original piece consists of four sections: the gain from marriage, each to her own according to values (assortive mating), division of household's output, and an additional section about some extensions. Preparing to put the relationship on a utility function, Becker says:
A sufficient condition to justify aggregation [into a single aggregate Z] with fixed weights is that all commodities [that is, the quality of meals, the quality and quantity of children, prestige, recreation, companionship, love, and health status] have constant returns to scale, use factors in the same proportion, and are affected in the same way by productivity-augmenting variables, such as education. (p.207-208)
I'd agree that the quality of meals and
quantity of children has "constant returns to scale". How did Becker come to assert the same about prestige remains a mystery for me. That last condition may also be a valid topic for debate, but the middle one leaves me without any sense of sense and a bemused smile on my face. Further:
Maximizing utility thus becomes equivalent for each person to maximizing the amount of Z that he or she receives.(p.208)
Luckily, we now
know Herbert Simon's concept of satisficing, a way more realistic description of
'the ends' of human decision-making in a non-conflict non-strategic situation. Fast-forward:
If Zm0 and Z0f represents the maximum outputs of single Max and Francsesca, and mmf and fmf their incomes when married, a necessary condition for Max and Francesca to marry is that
mmf ≥ Zm0
fmf ≥ Z0f (p.210)
The ivories of this knocked me out. I feel like o
nly Milton Friedman could save this construct with his epiphany, inspired in physics, that 'wrong assumptions do not necessarily yield wrong conclusions'. But then again, as Pierre Bourdieu noticed, "practice has a logic which is not that of logic[]" (p.86). And we are, where we were. Frankly, in flying over the next forty pages, I made my speed record, but I did not allow myself to be depleted of a nursery circular reasoning:
[I provided] an explanation of why persons who care for each other are more likely to marry each other than otherwise similar persons do not. This in turn provides justification for assuming that each family acts as if it maximizes a single utility function (p.244-245).
A feminist economist proactively adviced to "get the better of Becker". However, the empirical data, which I can well imagine can be useful for policy making, such as
Single women clearly "work" more than married women and single men less than married men. (US Bureau of Census 1963 quoted at p.209)
...would be here with or without the construct. So I still wonder what nonobvious knowledge came out of this? What is it famed for? And with Becker's characteristic uncocern for formulating some distinctive (presumptive) properties of the approppriate cases, which are to be explained with rational choice (e.g. p.205; see also p.90 here), it is tempting to skip several steps and jump to the underlying conclusion in Flyvbjerg 2001:70: it is not a good idea to support the natural-scientific ideal of social sciences with the Nobel Prize (after all, something Friedrich von Hayek was not far from saying).
Notes
*It has been noticed from within (examples include
Oliver Williamson 2005:25).
**Perhaps, the first two are caused just by the 'world-view defining' core of microeconomics (what are the round-abouts?). And perhaps, Harford's personal experience is valid: economics does make people less nationalist, and, marginaly more interested in results, than rhetoric.
***If you, by whip and spur, associate Apples with Steve Jobs, check this out.
BECKER, G. (1976). Economic Approach to Human Behavior. Chicago University Press.
