Month: December 2017

Professor Jon Wisman notes that “critics from outside the discipline, and from inside (generally heterodox economists such as institutionalists, Marxists, and most recently behavioral economists) have insisted that the mainstream conception of human behavior is not only scientifically inadequate, but socially perverse” in response to the new book by Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro:  Cents and Sensibility.

“In its early years as a developing social science, economics (called political economy at the time) embraced Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism to define its theoretical understanding of human behavior. For Thomas Carlyle, this meant that at its core, economics was ‘pig philosophy.’ Social critic John Ruskin was of the same mind, and directly called economics ‘pig philosophy.’ Undeterred, mainstream economics continued to refine, or perhaps better said, reduce, its conception of human behavior to the fundamental position of utilitarianism until today it could be expressed as ‘humans are calculatingly rational self-interested actors.’ Although it’s no longer emphasized, presumably they do so to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, just as Bentham claimed.

However, ever since Carlyle and Ruskin, critics from outside the discipline, and from inside (generally heterodox economists such as institutionalists, Marxists, and most recently behavioral economists) have insisted that the mainstream conception of human behavior is not only scientifically inadequate, but socially perverse insofar as it instructs folks as to how they should behave (studies have found students of economics less generous than students generally). And now, hot off the press is another broadside against our discipline’s understanding of human behavior. It’s Cents and Sensibility by Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro (Princeton University Press/Princeton University Press). Morson teaches language and literature and Schapiro is an economist. Their book probably won’t change the minds of many mainstream economists any more than did the countless earlier works attempting the same thing, but it’ll provide lots of fresh fuel for their critics.”

View more thoughts on Cents and Sensibility in “Why economists need Tolstoy.”

PhD students Chang He and Stephan Lefebvre have been working in the Learning Evaluation and Accountability Department (LEAD) of Oxfam America on the project “Old Data, New Ideas for Gender Justice.” The project saw He and Lefebvre reanalyze data from completed agricultural development initiatives in order to add a substantive gender component to the analysis. He completed an analysis of the R4 Rural Resilience Initiative in Senegal, a partnership between Oxfam American and the UN World Food Project, while Lefebvre produced a report on the results from a randomized control trial in Haiti on the System for Rice Intensification (SRI). They presented their work at the American Evaluation Association conference in Washington, D.C. on November 6-11, 2017.

The Emerging Evaluators Fellowship Program allowed He and Lefebvre to gain valuable experience working with practitioners and policy experts at Oxfam while contributing statistical analysis and writing policy briefs. Lefebvre noted: “This was a great fit for Chang and me, especially in light of our coursework in PGAE (Program on Gender Analysis in Economics). The team at Oxfam doesn’t shy away from the technical issues – we had many debates about different econometric approaches and robustness tests – and they also integrate feminist analysis into all of their evaluation and accountability work.”