On line. Not only an economist – autobiographical reflections of a historian of economic thought.
Mark Blaug probably did more than any other single person to make the philosophy and methodology of economics a growth area during the 1980s. The specialisation and professionalisation of this area had the perverse effect of wasting several decades of effort by many talented and energetic scholars, with very little value fo working economists. This is a apparent from the stocktaking caried out by Wade Hands in Reflection Without Rules (2001), where the clear message is that the field has eventually arrived at something like the ideas of Karl Popper, which could have been taken up directly at least 40 years ago. Indeed Popper’s ideas were taken up directly by some people, including some economists such as Klappholz (with the aid of Joe Agassi). Radnizky, Boland (student of Agassi), Birner and Wong (student of Boland).
Possibly Blaug’s most serious mistake was to think that the
Lakatosian Methodology of Scientific Research Programs represented a development and defence of Popper’s best ideas, rather than a radically degenerating program.
Before further comments on that episode, a few remarks about other features of Blaug’s career.
Memoires can be fascinating documents and this is certainly the case with Mark Blaug’s reflections. His perception of McCarthyism in the US is important because that episode can be seen as a turning point in the battle of ideas which swung in favour of the left due to the actual or perceived excesses of McCarthyism. That was despite the simple fact that communists were undermining the system from high places in the administration, in the universities and elsewhere (notably in show business). Anti-communism was a worthy cause but McCarthyism gave rise to anti-anti-communism and this created a smokesecreen for the the activities of leftwing activists who thrived on the rapidly growing university campuses of the 1950s.
He wrote that he dropped communism like an old coat, but Marxism was harder to throw off, and he clearly remained a man of the left, although he would like to be regarded as a classicial liberal. he wrote “Throughout my professional career as an economist, I have admired Milton Friedman’s style of doing economics, while detesting his political views, and admired Paul Samuelson’s political views while disliking the type of economics he practices.” Hence he was very far politically from his doctoral supervisor, George Stigler. He regarded Stigler as a superb scholar and teacher, to the point where he copied Stigler’s style of lecturing and writing. He never got over the pupil to master relationship whenever they met later in life, and he was both amused and relieved to see the same deference of Stigler towards his own teacher, Frank Knight.
His career was marked by a series of happy accidents one of which was to fall into the economics of education in Britain after Yale refused to grant him tenure on the ground that they did not need a permanent teacher in the history of economics. After some time in the field he pronounced that the efforts to theorise “human capital” were not yielding fruit, and after some more time working on submissions for “Aid for Education” initiatives in the Third World he pronouned the whole thing a disgusting racket.
“I became more and more cynical about the Third World ministers and politicians I had to work with who exploited me and other economists like myself to get the aid they wanted, while lining their own pockets with the leavings of that aid. The amount of corruption and political hypocrisy that I witnessed in every country I worked in eventually turned me against the entire development consultancy business. Getting out was easy: all one did was to say something that Third World governments did not want to hear; by saying it often enough, one could be assured of not being rehired.”
During the 1970s he found himself drifting into the methodology of economics and he realised that he had always been something of a philosopher at heart. He was especially impressed by Karl Popper, in a very strange kind of way. The full extent of this strangeness will become apparent when he met Imre Lakatos.
“By the time I had come to work on my doctoral dissertation, I had somehow absorbed Popperian falsificationism without ever reading Popper. Some of it I acquired from Milton Friedman’s classic essay “The Methodology of Positive Economics” (1953), which, without mentioning Popper, presents a sort of vulgar, Mickey Mouse Popperianism. Some of it filtered down from remarks and asides in Stigler’s essays on the history of economic thought…When, I published my first professional paper in 1956, “The Empirical Content of Ricardian Economics”, it was shot through by predictionism, but, nevertheless, I still had read no Popper. Indeed, I can remember like yesterday the first moment I finally decided to read Popper.”
“In 1962, while living in Paris, I strolled into a bookshop one Friday afternoon and saw a copy of Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) which, as everyone knows, is a study of Plato, Hegel and Marx as three great enemies of the open society, I went home and started reading it as soon as I had finished dinner. I read all night, all day Saturday, and, after falling asleep reluctantly, finished the book on Sunday. I can safely say that no book before and no book since has excited me more. It was literally like drinking a whole bottle of champagne at a single sitting. Not only did it slay Plato and Hegel, both of whom I had always regarded as monsters of the right, but it made short shrift of Marx for committing the “apocalyptic fallacy”, the game of predicting doomsday some day in the indefinite future. At the same time, it offered a philosophy of science, falsificationism, and a convincing argument against political revolutions, on the grounds that we lack the knowledge totally to transform society, but that we can and should reform society on a piecemeal basis.”
“I then sat down and read everything that Popper had ever written. I became a through-and-through Popperian and although I now think that there are exaggerations in Popper–there is no such thing as induction; there is a fundamental asymmetry between verification and falsification; methodology is normative and has nothing to do with the history of science–I remain to this day an unregenerate Popperian.”
Unfortunately his take on Popper is very limited and he never took on board the full extent of Popper’s ideas. That is revealed in his list of so-called exaggerations in Popper. In brief, there is indeed no logic of induction, there is a fundamental asymmetry between the logic of verification and falsification, and matters of logic cannot be decided by historical studies. So his take on Popper was very thin and his claim to be an unregenerate Popperian can only damage the standing of Popper’s ideas. His lack of grasp on Popperism enabled him to fall hook, line and sinker for the tales told by Imre Lakatos.
“Sometime in the late 1960s, while I was teaching regularly at LSE, I met Imre Lakatos, Popper’s successor to the professorship in logic and philosophy of science at LSE. Imre, in the few years that I knew him (he died in 1974), was someone of whom I became extremely fond… He had a marvelous sense of humour and we took to each other almost as soon as we met. He knew no economics but was becoming interested in economics as a field of application for his methodological views, inspired by one of his PhD students, Spiro Latsis, who was indeed the first to apply Lakatos’ ideas to economics. In 1974, Imre organized a conference in Greece, which was to bring together physicists, economists, and philosophers of science in the attempt to develop some case studies in his own “methodology of scientific research programmes”. A month before the conference was to take place, he died suddenly. Spiro Latsis went on to hold the conference as a memorial to Imre and it proved to be, for myself and for many others, the conference of a lifetime. In economics, there were great men like Lionel Robbins, John Hicks, Terence Hutchison, Herbert Simon, and Axel Leijonhufvud. In philosophy, there were giants like Carl Hempel, Adolf Grunbaum and Paul Feyerabend. It was intellectually exciting; it was held in Nafplion, a beautiful site in Greece; and it was lavishly financed by John Latsis, Spiros Latsis’ father, who gave us all a glimpse of the style to which we would have loved to have become accustomed.”
“Arguments about the relationship between Popper and Lakatos have raged on ever since 1974. I regard Lakatos as, say, 80 per cent Popper and 20 per cent Kuhn, emphasizing different things but conveying essentially the same methodology as that of Popper.”
That is simply not true. Lakatos muddled and confused Popper’s take on falsification with a silly story about a series of mythical Poppers. He wanted to regenerate “a whiff of induction” and he took over Popper’s theory of metaphysical research programs and rebadged it (sans the esssential Popperian element of criticism) in the form of the Methodology of Scientific Research Programs which (with its rival, paradigm theory) wasted some decades of academic effort.
It is hard to argue with Blaug’s final comments on the debacle of formalism in economics!
Over to Mark Blaug.
