Politics and social science disciplines do not evolve independently of one another. Since econ became hegemonic in non-macro policy fields (70s), we see a recurrent dynamic.
When disciplinary knowledge tends to point in a particular political direction, but some people within the discipline would like it to point in a different direction, they will eventually develop new methods/approaches/schools of thought that tend to lean that way.
This is not to suggest that individual studies are politically motivated. It’s more that a dissatisfaction with existing answers leads to a search for new approaches that will provide different ones.
This dynamic at least partly explains the origins of the credibility revolution in econ. Econ became hegemonic in social policy in the late 60s/early 70s, in part because it helped tame the more radical aspects of the Great Society.
(Condensing a lot there, just go with it for now.)
In the 70s, RCTs became the gold standard for social policy intervention. Nonexperimental evidence was easy to dismiss as not demonstrating causality. This made it hard to provide a strong argument for government interventions not amenable to RCT.
This is the backstory to the CR. Ashenfelter, who worked in the Dept of Labor in early 70s, wanted better tools for identifying when government interventions worked in the context of a political environment that was heavily weighting RCTs.
When these tools were actually developed and deployed 15+ years later, they did in fact often provide such evidence – e.g. on returns to schooling or the effects of minimum wage.
And they made it easier to advocate for a particular set of interventions than it was before. You don’t need an RCT, and you can’t just handwave and say it’s all selection (schooling), or just point to theory (min wage).
(Aside: An analogous case is the role played by game theory and, later, work on labor market monopsony in antitrust policy.
In both cases, you have approaches that are appealing in part because they point to a different set of political options than the status quo ante (Chicago price theory).
They are also appealing for internal disciplinary reasons, as was the CR; there are always two games being played here at once, per Abbott.)
Luke’s q, though, is about whether the CR “reinforced the hegemony of neoclassical econ, forestalling deeper methodological and political reckonings.”
On one level, yes. The CR doesn’t challenge the core of econ and so by introducing methods that open new political options without upsetting econ hegemony more generally, it reinforces it.
And it’s still pretty politically limiting: the kind of policy effects you can consider are narrowly defined, and you are confined to evidence that is acceptable in disciplinary terms.
New approaches provide sort of a steam valve, so that emerging interest in political options incompatible with the disciplinary status quo doesn’t have to lead to loss of disciplinary influence or legitimacy.
But this is an inevitable dynamic. If the underlying q is whether the absence of a CR would have led to either greater political change or to the loss of econ hegemony, I don’t see any real reason to think so.
Without the CR, some other econ-compatible approach that could accommodate more interventionist tendencies would have developed instead.
IMO, the only thing that would produce loss of econ hegemony is enough change in the political environment that you can’t accommodate it sufficiently within the bounds of a neoclassical discipline. That is, the release valve stops working.
That might result from movements that create enough change that people in policy spaces become open to other disciplines using evidence in ways seen as illegitimate from inside econ.
Or it might be produced by generational change within the discipline: younger scholars find that the disciplinary core is insufficient to address their concerns about the world, and invent new ways to think about problems.
Until then, this gradual back-and-forth within the discipline will continue, which may at times facilitate progressive policy change, but has fundamentally (small-c) conservative effects. /fin
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Reading Mark Solovey's Social Science for What?, on the history of social science funding at NSF, and might take a few notes here. It's open access at @mitpress: mitpress.mit.edu/books/social-s…
I know a decent amount about the history of the social sciences in the second half of the 20th c., and a decent amount about the history of NSF, but not much about the intersection of the two.
The framing is "why is this thing (SS funding) that only makes up 5% of NSF's budget so perpetually controversial?" (Good question.)
On the Trump administration’s decision to kick international students out of the country if their universities go online: a short and angry thread. ice.gov/news/releases/…
This abysmal policy is really a three-fer for the administration.
First, it intentionally undercuts a major revenue source for large, especially public, institutions at a time of massive economic crisis. I don’t like that this is what universities have come to depend on to keep the lights on, but it’s the reality. graphics.wsj.com/international-…
Okay, a more coherent response to this paper. I say this with respect for the intent of the research as well as admiration for the analytical effort behind this massive project.
The reason I find it fundamentally problematic is that it provides a false precision in thinking about a counterfactual world in which students’ matching with colleges takes place without regard to their family’s income.
So I finished another paper draft today and wanted to commemorate the moment but am not quite ready to post this one to SocArXiv.
This paper is a rethink of an older draft on the rise of economics in antitrust policy that I’ve never quite figured out the angle on.
Lots of U.S. policy domains underwent some kind of free-market turn circa 1980: tax cuts, deregulation, social welfare cuts. In one sense, the narrowing of antitrust can be seen as just another example.
Okay, here’s a Sunday night thread on economic analysis of regulation for the three of you not watching GoT.
My book ms. is partly organized around following the impacts of two communities that help introduce economic reasoning into policymaking.
One is a systems analytic community with answers to the question “How should government make decisions?” Another is an industrial organization community asking “How should we govern markets?”
I’m geeking out a little about the fact that Open Markets has put the 1968 DOJ Merger Guidelines in the news. Here’s some historical context for an ironic move.
The 1960s was a high-water mark for antitrust enforcement in the U.S. The Supreme Court kept invalidating mergers that would have produced what now looks like a negligible amount of concentration.
For example, in Brown Shoe (1962) the Supreme Court rejected a merger that would have given the combined firm a market share of 5% because of a “tendency toward concentration” in the shoe industry.