Larissa MacFarquhar has, unwittingly, given us a revealing piece on Paul Krugman in the March 1st New Yorker. Tucked in among all the writerly bits of irrelevant, but supposedly illuminating details about the furniture in his St. Croix condo are really illuminating bits about his visit to a science fiction convention, and about the connection between the study of economics and science fiction, which neither she nor Mr. Krugman seem to grasp, to wit, economics is simply a branch of science fiction.
The dismal science is dismal indeed, but not science, which is to say you can put forth a hypothesis in economics but you cannot test that hypothesis with an experiment. So instead you do "modeling" which is to say you trot out big numbers which nobody can understand and you draw lots of graphs, and you develop a language, which only members of the club can fathom and you then allow certain communicators to enlighten the brain damaged public about the important things your field has to say.
Sprinkled among the sentences are little revealing tidbits about Professor Krugman. He has no kids, for one thing, just two adorable cats named Doris Lesing and Albert Einstein, which proves, as if we needed any more evidence, his wife and he are intellectuals. And they live in Princeton, because he is a professor at Einstein's old digs and they have a pied de terre , which is to say, he's fabulously successful, which is the proof he is really smart, in a real world way, which we already knew because he has a weekly column in the New York Times, which, of course, he resisted writing for fear it would dilute his academic reputation and a reputation is important for a public figure.
And don't forget he got the Nobel Prize in economics.
But don't forget also a prize is actually not an achievement. It's actually a recognition of achievement, but remember we are talking about achievement in economics here. And Milton Friedman won that prize and he hadn't a clue what he was talking about, at least when it came to the FDA and probably when it came to who was responsible for the Great Depression, but we'll never know about that because, as I said before, you can't do any experiments to prove or disprove that. Which just goes to show the Nobel Prize in economics is worth just about a bucket of warm spit, as Sam Rayburn once described the Vice Presidency.
And as I was reading this article about a man who has given voice to many of the things I was thinking, like how frustrating it's been to love Obama but having to watch him let the Republicans run all over him and over anyone who is actually serious about change--while I was reading this I kept getting all these neurons synapsing, bringing to my mind's eye that scene in the third season of The Wire (there we go with The Wire again, but it's better than Shakespeare and people have used Shakes as a touchstone for generations, so why not?) that scene where Howard "Bunny" Colvin, the police lieutenant who actually tried the experiment of legalizing drugs in his sector of West Baltimore (that's as in Bodymore, Murderland) and the results of that experiment were both encouraging and demoralizing. Bunny has moved on to a job with a University of Maryland project in the public schools, trying to yank bad actors out of the classroom, to find out what makes them explode and the study involves intervention to do something to help the bad actors and the schools they destroy.
What Bunny discovers is the only thing which will ever happen as a result of this project is the academics will write papers and they will then write papers about the papers which are written about this, but nobody will actually ever do anythng about the problems identified. And certainly, nobody will ever do an experiment in this setting.
Bunny tried doing an experiment once and it cost him his job and his pension.
And there, buried in the MacFarquar piece, is a sentence from Krugman saying he really wouldn't want a job in government, where he'd have to put his ideas into action because, well, you know, then he would have to see if they are actually true.
Or, put more generously, he might see his ideas compromised when other people refuse to accept them and that would be like being President, not getting what you want.
So what does all this have to do with Sandlot Baseball, you ask?
I loved sandlot baseball. Wish I could find a bunch of guys to play on weekends. There you had the true essence of the game--just trying to make good plays, make good contact with the ball, diving catches and all the rest. Never knew what the score was. Didn't matter. It was the great play that mattered. We hardly even kept score. All that was semi ruined when I played as an adult and guys kept trying to beat the other guys. You have to beat the pitcher every time you step up to the plate, but that wasn't enough. I thought winning and score keeping actually ruined the game, but that's my problem.
So,anyway, I hated the idea adults got in the way of kids learning to love baseball. Adults coached little league and it was no longer about baseball. It was about winning and about the adults and about competition.
I also hated the culture my second son grew up in, where he got sucked up into wrestling at age seven and spent hours being taught by adults how to beat another kid and what he could expect and how he could counter the stuff thrown at him and how he would feel when he was losing or had lost and how to cope with that to stay in the game. My son had more one on one time with adults teaching him stuff during those dozen years he wrestled than I had until I got to medical school and housestaff training. My father's idea of instructing me was to shout at me from the porch as I was mowing the lawn if I missed a spot.
But the thing is, that intensive passing on of knowledge, of cultural artifacts, overbearing and time consuming and annoying as it may be, is crucial to the achievement of manhood in the modern age.
Watching Master and Commander was to see a very familiar experience, as Lucky Jack, captain of the Suprise continues the midshipmen's lessons in use of the sextant even as the French warship closes in from behind on his ship and cannon balls are landing nearby. I recognized that scene from medical school, where a cardiac arrest was being run and throughout the action, the resident or the attending, continued the discussion of mitochrondial action or resistance factor among bacteria, to emphasize that nothing was more important than learning medicine, not even the practical action of caring for patients. Nothing interrupted teaching rounds. Not even the French frigate firing cannon at you.
So what does that have to do with Paul Krugman and economics?
Well, just this. You see, to be a man in this world, you have to be taught intensively by men and once you learn what that have to tell you, you are equiped to use that knowledge, to overcome your own perfectly reasonable fear using what you've been taught and drilled to do to stand up in the face of fear and to perform and to see the results of your training, to put the knowledge to the test. You have to have faith in what you've been taught, to use it and to succeed with it.
In my own case, as a sandlot player as a kid, I was terrified by a really powerful fastball thrown in anger. I'd fall back away from the plate and not even swing. So, as a kid, playing without the benefit of adults imparting knowledge, I failed to develop a theory of hitting I could act upon.
But, years later, as an adult, I acquired a guru who taught me about hitting. After hours in the batting cage and with the teaching of a good hitting coach, I learned to stand in that batter's box, learned what to expect and how to react to it. And in game situations where I had failed as an unschooled child, I succeeded as an adult.
In my son's case, we had to go out into distant lands, almost like hiking up the mountainside to the guru, but we did it so he could learn from the master. And the master taught him one move which he used when all seemed lost and he prevailed.
And what was that all about? The triumph of preparation, teaching, execution of theory, testing of knowledge on the hot anvil of oposition and proving the worth of the theory.
Economics has none of that testing, in any meaningful way. So enconomists, as a group, remain children.
The ordinary medical intern has more verifiable knowledge than the most revered, Nobel Prize winning economist. A patient comes into the hospital with ketoacidosis, or pulmonary edema, the intern has a theory about the pathophysiology, does the experiment, acts on that theory and saves that patient's ass.
That intern stands in the batter's box and doesn't blink.
Milton Friedman, Paul Krugman, Larry Summers, John Cochrane, David Levine, Jeffrey Sachs, none of them can say that. They may be asked to consult, but none of them really know what they are doing because they are trying to practice science without doing the experiments to verifiy what they teach.
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