"On the Moon, nerds get their pants pulled down and they are spanked with moon rocks."

Suppose you were to teach an introductory class on applied rational-choice theory. The goal would be to reach students interested in political phenomena but methodologically undecided: to give them a sympathetic but non-triumphalist presentation of RCT "on the ground" without requiring them to invest so much in tools as to make it a waste for all but the converted. Perhaps an advanced undergrad seminar, or a class for MA students (or PhD students who, with funding package in hand, can now admit that they have no idea what they want to focus on...); "Rational Choice Perspectives on Political Order and Disorder" might be a good topic. You could count on effort and general academic achievement, but no math/econ background.

You wouldn't want to spend every class refighting the Perestroika Wars; you'd need to bracket the philosophy of social science stuff, insist on suspension of disbelief, simply in order to make room for learning the material. But at the same time, it would be a disservice to ... well, to something; the Enlightenment, maybe?-- to ignore the Big Questions entirely. I'm thinking perhaps a week devoted to philosophy of social science / the natural of scientific explanation, and then a week of critical assessments of RCT in the light of that; perhaps time constraints would demand squeezing both parts into one week. Leave it for the end of the semester--with perhaps a teaser reading at the very beginning?--so they can draw on what they've spend the class learning. What do you think?

More specifically, what would you assign? Here's what I came up with off the top of my head after a couple of hours:

1. For the nature of rationality, and particularly the question of whether rationality is limited to instrumental, means-to-ends reasoning, or can extend to reasoning about ends and value, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a great review article on Practical Reason. Sections 4 and 5 are particularly apt.

2. For the nature of scientific explanation--when is something an explanation rather than a "mere description" or a "just-so story"?--the SEP's article on Scientific Explanation is great.

3. Ok, so what does it mean for us? In "Rational Choice History: A Case of Excessive Ambition," a review of an influential collection of rational-choice "analytic narratives," Jon Elster expresses skepticism over whether RCT is capable of doing all that its practitioners ask (and boast) of it; the authors of the collection, in turn, respond.

4. For a more extended argument by Elster about "The Nature and Scope of Rational-Choice Explanation," see his early article of that title.

5. How do practicing game theorists view their rational-choice models? Ariel Rubinstein has some sobering "Comments on the Interpretation of Game Theory."

   Roger Myerson, another prominent game theorist, has a more positive (though still nuanced) take "On the Value of Game Theory in Social Science."

6. Finally, the history of rational choice political science--coauthored by someone who helped make it happen. "The Rochester School: The Origins of Positive Political Theory."

The Rochester School article would probably make a good teaser for the start of the course; the Myerson and Rubinstein pieces are great but perhaps more jargony than is ideal (though I really love the latter). Taken as a whole, is it too critical? Too sympathetic? What's missing--would you want a defense of alternate approaches; if so, which, and what? Something on social epistemology, science studies, and the like? What could be left out? Go wild!

(Inspired by Will Wilkinson's new hobby-horse, and Off-Blog Happenings.)

Grumpy before my time

Any article titled "An Economist Goes to a Bar And Solves the Mysteries of Dating" is pretty much guaranteed to annoy me. Now, again, the research here is rather interesting: they ran speed-dating experiments for two years and thus have a huge data set on 4-minute interactions between Columbia grad students, at the end of which each decides whether or not they'd be interested in a future date. Very cool. One might question how generalizable are conclusions derived from Columbia grad students (or from speed-dating), but still, neat.

My complaint is simply that the author is doing the world a disservice by implying ("all of this rational-choice stuff") that if you want to study this sort of thing, you should look to economics. This is social psychology pure and simple (and indeed, two of the coauthors were psychologists). Now, none of this would matter much ... except that the social ecology of knowledge-production really is sensitive to considerations like this. It's not good for Truth when economics is seen as the only "real" social science, and bright students go for econ PhDs regardless of the questions they intend to study or the methods best suited for studying them.

UPDATE: to clarify a bit--I don't have a problem with interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity, done well, is great. What I have a problem with is when the general public comes to have a distorted view about what various disciplines are about. If you go to grad school for econ, you'll spend your first years with Mas-Colell, Whinston, and Green; it's not the most natural place for learning how to conduct field studies to gather data on social interactions.

Words have meanings, part XXVI

In the midst of an otherwise-excellent article summarizing what appears to be quite nice research on the degree to which auto repair shops correctly diagnose problems and prescribe unnecessary services, David Leonhardt inserts a rather curious claim: that this research somehow exemplifies "freakonomics," against which there has been a (possibly justified) backlash, but does so in a good way. In doing so he links to an older NYTimes piece that seems just atrocious, one that runs together a number of totally different trends:

(1) economists studying non-market interactions (Beckerites, public choice folks, etc.)
(2) economists distancing themselves from political advocacy, seeing themselves as impartial scientists
(3) economists turning to statistics (or empirical work more broadly) as opposed to formal modeling
(4) economists turning to micro- as opposed to macro- level questions
(5) economists studying "the everyday"

Whatever categories you think Steve Levitt's work falls into, it's just insane to claim that these 5 things are somehow identical. Nor do they necessarily go together. Examples are easy enough to come by--David Friedman's "Hidden Order" is clearly 5, 1, and 4, but certainly not 2 or even 3.

Schneider's research is at the heart of economics: the study of market interactions. It's probably true to say that it's in some sense Not What Most Economists Do, but let's be a bit more precise about what we're talking about. He's studying "the everyday," but the everyday of the market, and while it's micro and empirical it doesn't at all sound like one of those "this instrumental variable regression will explain once and for all a complicated multicausal phenomenon that other social sciences, whose work I shall not read, let alone cite, have studied for decades" findings. Can we please reserve the term "Freakonomics" for the book and the blog? No? Sigh.