I'm often asked about my career choices: why I walked away from the competitions of Economics publications and focus instead on teaching quality. Here are some notes on my pedagogy, which are applicable to any course I ever teach. If you have ever been a student of mine, you have likely heard many of these thoughts.
On School
Schooling, seemingly everywhere and always, can be seen conducting two massive social functions:
Assimilating the masses: discipline, legitimation, class-division, appropriation, socialization, etc.
Educating the masses: literacy, enskillment, information, intellectual liberation, socialization, etc.
This sets up a difficult trade-off, laying out a crucial critical task in both the teaching of, and enrollment within, any kind of school. Luckily, the tug-of-war between these forces has never truly maintained any decisive victories, as the spirit of liberating education has stood strong within teachers worldwide. Wise is a tree that smiles in the face of fleeting winds.
On Science, Mathematics, and Storytelling
Humans seem bound to look out at the world, acknowledge its beautifully interconnected wholeness, and still nonetheless see `things’ that we differentiate from other `things’. We tell amazing stories to each other about these things and how they work. These facts alone inspire the foundations of mathematics and Broadway theater alike. We live in a seemingly inescapable condition of fiction. Hopefully we find immense satisfaction in guiding our stories in the most reasonable, fulfilling, unharmful, and liberating directions.
Some stories are sticky. Religious even. Scientism, for example, has run rampant through the entire schooling system. The solidarity of academia rests on a general acceptance of scientist prestige acting as a hierarchical degree of socio-political charisma (their opinion matters more), socially deifying any achievement of technical quantitative studies. The philosophical roots of this culture can be traced through the celebrated lineage of logical positivism, which made waves in the formative years of our postmodern political landscape.
“Philosophy is to be replaced by the logic of science - that is to say, by the logical analysis of the concepts and sentences of the sciences, for the logic of science is nothing other than the logical syntax of the language of science.”
- Rudolph Carnap, icon of the logical positivist group, "The Vienna Circle".
The gist of such positivism is a belief that the formalities of modern science (as opposed to `woowoo' religion, spirituality, or metaphysics) deserve all the credit for the notable gains in the welfare of Europeans during the early 20th century, and thus society should transition their ideological focus away from finding truth in God toward the pursuit of finding truth in Science. Such an ideological lighthouse must surely bring us toward the Truth, and our optimal godly application of it. In this mission `science' must be defined in such a way to exclude the nonsensical ideas of anything that isn't sufficiently clever or mathematical. In other words… Math, linguistics, computer science, and what we now generally call `analytical’ philosophy are all that count as philosophy, and nothing else is worthwhile for Western thought. How fun!
The normative theories of logical positivism tend to embrace `reality' through a dualist separation between empirical laws of observation and theoretical laws of logical deduction. Treating `empirics' as `realism' has caused a plethora of academic disciplines to become increasingly obsessed with statistics. New methods of data acquisition have led to massive breakthroughs in our understanding of many things. It has also generated an endless variety of farcical intellectual bubbles, with statistically significant and mathematically-proven meaninglessness abound. Many disciplines have become completely crowded out by whatever collections of data are collected at the most microscopic level (quarks, neurons, chains of protein, commodities), with little to no interest given to the larger social dynamics of their craft.
These statistical disciplines, while informative, have also led to mass confusion and absurd dogma regarding empirical validity. Scientific crises, statistical alienation, bad teaching, the list of problems is truly endless. Importantly for pedagogy, Carnap's dualism leaves out any question of value. What deductions should we conduct? The human sensory experience is incredibly multi-dimensional and textured. What kind of 'empirics’ do we consider most compelling and most beneficial for society? Or just for scientists?... or for corporate profit?.......
I believe it's perfectly possible in our current liberal political climate to navigate the spaces of school, and science, in the pursuit of education through the weeds of assimilation. So too, we should be careful as to how our scientific methods can be assimilated as well. Carnap, along with most positivists, saw empirics as Steph Curry’s left hand guiding the logical strength and precision of his right. As a trained student of math, I too can’t help but appreciate logical deduction. But the obsession with crude statistics as our only means of seeing the world has led us astray. It's as if we're shooting half-court blindfolded, and without our left hand at all. Surely we can take a more human approach to guide our logical investigations.
A scientist who aims to be humanist needs to acquire and share tools, not facilitate subservience to machines. A humanist science must collect and efficiently communicate observations of robust patterns of nature, patterns that would be difficult to see otherwise. It is our job to educate: to help ourselves collectively see the world. Such scholars may be motivated by this goal to live in harmony with nature's beauty, for profundity, for pragmatic decisions (using technology), among countless other reasons. Yet `empirics’ must not begin only with frequentist statistics, but with reasonable and civil agreement on the fundamental questions,
“What things do you see? Do you see the things that I see?”
By my standards, the inability of a scientist to communicate their discoveries is an essential failure. If we observe a pattern of nature, but insist that this pattern can only be seen by elites, then we are conflicted educators. We've created a class division. If we instead insist that observable patterns are only meaningful when shared, then science can be practiced in solidarity. Empirical science should illuminate the human experience, not alienate and reject it.
I believe a healthy path toward mending our expertise crisis can be paved by returning to a concept of academic discourse founded upon the fundamentals of public literacy and access to valuable learned experiences, teaching students how to use technology as a tool for their own freedom rather than a hierarchical machine to be placed within. But this doesn't change the fact that science is conducted by humans with biases. It's likely a good idea to remind ourselves that intellectuals ultimately have the responsibility to critique outdated or manipulative ideologies and `tell the truth’, in whatever shape they most believe in.
Science and academia should be key tools not just in the discipline of civilizing each other, but in humanizing each other. For this to happen, schooling needs constant critical maintenance, and instructors who care. Unfortunately, the dismal crises of modern times leave one in constant disbelief that current scientific standards encourage sufficiently critical thinking...
On Research, Teaching, and Scholarship
The modern professor has two primary jobs: publishing research in academic journals to meet their tenure requirements, and teaching. Universities pride themselves on the research opportunities available for their students, as such opportunities have become symbols to wealthy parents and other donors of the correlation between Scientism and contemporary social power. By accumulating top-tier researchers, the university persuades their customers that students have access to the most brilliant and cutting-edge product, and will be trained to be the most cutting-edge intellectual soldiers.
A problem lies in the assumption that professors who are the best at publishing articles are also the best teachers.
Modern academic research positions place immense competitive pressures on research professors to publish within very narrow ranges of top academic journals. Tenure is most often determined solely by a faculty members' number of academic articles within a small bunch of specific elite journals demanding toilsome publication requirements. The filtration/selection of professors is thus determined by an egotistical struggle for recognition, professors forever stuck playing a zero-sum game of publication, with winners decided by the cleverness of potentially meaningless models of strawman social problems. Is this valuable content to teach undergraduates? Or more fundamentally, does such a technical expert have any incentive to teach well, when their teaching quality is more-or-less discarded in their tenure evaluation? Were they even hired upon their ability to be an educator?
`Empirically’ and historically, no. Apathetic, lazy, bitter teachers are the norm at universities everywhere. This is a part of the reason why people like me exist. Some of us are fine with relieving ourselves of the self-imposed ego war. Instead, we focus on asking how we can try to best educate our students, how to choose important readings and analysis, explain them clearly, establish fair, provocative, and challenging assessments, and provide enjoyable and memorable formative experiences to thousands of individuals. Personally, I'd happily argue that this pedagogical work is dramatically more influential/important than any of the journal articles currently published in most fields.
More and more academics are beginning to consider teaching-focused paths, with more jobs lining up in response to growing student populations, creating an up-and-down of supply and demand with uncertain long-term outcomes on our relative wages. While these jobs typically don’t offer any form of tenure track, that does not relieve the fundamental responsibility of intellectuals. While we are not evaluated on publication criteria, we are still acting within assimilating institutions that legitimate class divides, perpetuating elitist practices of on-average little to no social value. This extends the responsibility of instructors not just to `tell the truth', but to constantly ask which truths are actually worth spending so much time telling. It is necessary to maintain active studiousness, to understand our discipline within a variety of historical contexts, and generally care about what we are doing. These are not naive concerns, these are fundamental responsibilities. To actively be a humane instructor is to remain a student of humanity.
On Economics and Social Studies
Now we can finally discuss the discipline that I have most studied, that you likely have as well. If you've followed the whole discussion, you can see that I take a critically philosophical approach to the dismal science. You may have noticed in your own observations that quite often indeed, Economists tend to need to at least dip their overly-eager toes into the philosophy of science. This is simply a necessary armor for a thorny discipline.
Economic theory has a pretty mutated history. Along with the rest of academia, but perhaps in extreme magnitude, Economics has promoted the invasion of logical positivism across the entire spectrum of the discipline's mainstream. Very peculiar shifts at equally peculiar moments in history have somehow accumulated into a clear body, the Neoclassical Synthesis, to emerge from a collection of smoggy origins and present itself as the ruler of social science and reasoning behind authoritarian government policy. While not exactly the clear intention of any of its' founders, neoclassical economic theory integrates general equilibrium theory, rational choice theory, bits of game theory and behavioral economics and laissez-faire political theory among many other ideas, to claim itself as the `most scientific' understanding of `how the economy works', and therefore presents itself as the most astute language with which to discuss essential issues of the capital order such as global trade, monetary and fiscal policy, austerity/welfare programs, etc.
Through the accumulation of this cherry-picked literature, Economics perhaps boasts the most amount of mathematical deduction among the social sciences, and perhaps even some of the most complex statistical methodologies. In terms of the complexity of logical deduction, Economics is indeed among the most empirically and theoretically advanced of the social sciences. Is that more scientific?
To be extremely general, neoclassical Economics, while laboring endlessly on developing innovative `econometric methods' (statistics) for potential testing, has almost no body of evidence in favor of any of it's falsifiable assumptions. Humans are not consistent rational decision-makers, markets are not inseparable from constantly shifting politics and militant violence and thus do not equilibrate, human behavior and well-being are driven by far more than `consumption', and there is still no robust argument in favor of any clear mechanical relation between the money supply and the employment rate (our beloved Phillips Curve) other than the gang of models incorporating all of these assumptions at once. Despite acing Carnap's test, Economics is clearly not behaving like a `proper' science, completely free from being subject to any sort of empirical Laws of Nature. We have beautiful models, like Legos or airplane figurines or Gundam or snow globes, but do we `scientifically' understand particle physics or astronomy or killer robot design or the Earth's ecology, by playing with these toys? Of course not. Are they useless? Also of course not.
Very few of the Great Economists cited in textbooks ever intended on their work belonging to this strange synthesis. That doesn't mean this collection of deductions and statistics are absolutely worthless, but we need some serious re-synthesizing. While most Economists find themselves writing more and more technical additions to the yet undiscovered but somehow assuredly predestined successful scientific application of the True economic model, no one is given any credibility working on a re-synthesis, or critiquing the base level of our educational programs. This is an incredibly ripe opportunity for the classroom, and not the academic journal.
So... is neoclassical Economics a social pseudo-science, as opposed to other real social sciences? Well... yes, if we are evaluating the scientific/empirical validity of the neoclassical synthesis and it's political ramifications. Any sort of political sentiment legitimized by this collection of inaccurate and non-descriptive models is an absurd extrapolation without a doubt, routinely criticized by seemingly every non-Economist gaze.
But it's worth being critical of the positivist notion of social `science' of all kinds. Economists disagree so much about their straw men that they tend to propose further and further division between Micro and Macro, Strategic Stability and Market Clearing, Empirics and Theory, Historians and Technocrats, Rationalists and Behaviorists, etc without actually debating their fundamental assumptions and frameworks. Meanwhile, common concensus among many other social sciences seems to be in favor of further integration and interdisciplinary work. No surprises here, simply Economics trying its best to win the delusional Hegelian competition instead of thinking pedagogically. For most social scholars, the contemporary need to re-synthesize is obvious.
Social theory is in crisis across the board, in spades within academic departments of psychology, economics, sociology, and political science. It's time for paradigm shifts, not mindless measurement and modeling. How will such a synthesis handle the contemporary problems of empirics, theory, and most importantly, value? New social theory must address these primary concerns, inseparable from the institutions of schooling and politics. There is much work to do :)