Fun with Online Polls: Hayekian Public Intellectuals Edition

Over at Taking Hayek Seriously, Greg Ransom is having some fun with an online poll to pick the top "Hayekian Public Intellectuals".  There are plenty of familiar names there.   Feel free to head on over and vote.  And, please, one set of votes only, Vasily.  Stuffing the ballot box is tacky (although it might explain some of the current results).

Comments

[Dave Prychitko]

Hmm. I guess I'm one of the write in candidates.

[Peter Boettke]

I wonder if we overvalue public intellectuals, and undervalue scholarship in this day and age of instant public publishing.

[Steve Horwitz]

It's an interesting list, especially since four of the top vote getters ARE PhDs and legit scholars, with three of those four having university appointments.

[JH]

How can the public even place a value scholarship when it is inaccessible to them?

[Greg Ransom]

It takes active measures to stuff the ballot box.

If you need to cheat to do well on this list I'd guess you don't belong on the list ...

[Dave Prychitko]

JH makes an interesting point. Most scholarship (yesterday and today) is not intended for the public, and more often than not they find it unreadable. Scholars (qua scholars) talk among themselves -- that's the community of science, the community of scholars. And that's fine. It's the public intellectual who, ideally, interprets the scholarly research in ways that make more sense to the public.

By the way, having taught in two state undergraduate programs, I often joke -- though with seriousness, too -- that we often don't have a community of scholars in these programs, we have a community of committee members!

[Greg Ransom]

There's a role IN SCIENCE for "public intellectual" work.

E.g. Gerald Edelman "puts it all together" in neuroscience / brain science is his "public intellectual" books in a way that challenges the thinking ever anyone working in the field.

Joaquin Fuster does the same thing.

Randy Barnett & Cass Sunstein do this kind of thing as well.

So did Hayek ... his _The Constitution of Liberty_ was meant as both a "public intellectual" work and a scholarly work, and it's operated as such. Hayek sent the book to both politicians and academics, journalists and specialists in their field ..

[Dave Prychitko]

I agree, Greg. Perhaps I'm misunderstood for using the term "qua scholar." One can certainly write up scholarship in a way that also appeals to the public -- a kind of wearing two hats.

[Peter Boettke]

Why is Richard Epstein doing so poorly? He is the "smartest" and most "consistent" Hayekian thinker outside of the discipline of economics.

Thomas Sowell would be the leading candidate if Knowledge and Decisions was representative of his public intellectual work.

Gerald O'Driscoll has probably written the most for public audiences on the bailout, though Larry White is certainly coming on strong --- as is George Selgin and Steve Horwitz.

In my earlier comment I wasn't disrespecting the public intellectual --- in Jacoby's book he claims that the professor is now the public intellectual in a way that the book critic was a generation ago. And I agree that in our capacity as teachers and communicators of economic ideas (including blog) we do wear the hat of public intellectual.

Some wear it more comfortably than others.

I was just asking about the unique space for economics as peer discourse in a scientific discipline. Do we undervalue that exercise now-a-days with this sort of instant gratification public intellectualism (real time publishing online, etc.)? What, if any, cost is associated with this? Are we spending down the accumulated surplus of acquired knowledge in the discipline, or do we still hope for the discovery of new knowledge in the field. What should we train our students to prepare to compete with in the marketplace of intellectual careers?

[Chris]

I'm with JH on this. Academic scholarship is a closed shop and should rightfully be distrusted by the public. I just listened to a Douglass North lecture in which he says, "Everybody would like to have a monopoly, including us academics, more than anybody else, because, after all, a competitive world is very insecure world." He said it during his discussion of how elites try to restrict competition. One comment on the present post above in particular sounds like old (academic) money sneering at new (public intellectual) money, for reasons analogous to those mentioned by Douglass North.

[Dave Prychitko]

Chris:

I don't agree with you that scholarship ought to be distrusted because it is done in the academic community. To move outside of economics, would your criticism apply to physicists, chemists, geologists, and so on who also appear to be doing research in a "closed shop" environment.

[Peter Boettke]

Chris,

It is not about trustworthiness or not, it is about the division of labor in the truth tracking quest. Nobody is sneering (or even intending to sneak a sneer). I am asking a sincere question about the division of labor in intellectual affairs, and what will be the consequences for the growth of human knowledge if we push all scholarly discourse into public intellectual discourse. Esoteric excess might explain the worst of academic scribbling, but political expediency and popular fallacy explain the worst of magazine and op-ed writing.

The great political scientist Russell Hardin once told me that he thought no great political theory had ever been writen by a thinker that wasn't himself engaged in a political struggle. He also was the author of the argument that econonmic liberalism was a practice in search of a theory, while political liberalism was a theory in search of an application -- another interesting proposition. Anyway, if Hardin is right about political theory and political struggle, then there must be a direct engagement of the scholar with the real world of praxis in order to make break-throughs theoretically. In this regard, Hardin would see the sort of division of labor I am suggesting as "artificial" to some extent in the field of political economy.

Which brings me back to the list? Why not James Buchanan? If Doug North is listed, certainly James Buchanan should be listed, right?

And if we want to use public intellectual in the usual meaning of the term, I think Karen Horn should be listed --- see her recent piece on Adam Smith and his relevance for today.

The list as it is currently being discussed is basically academics who write for wider audiences. Academics who are experts on Hayek in the specialized field of history of thought (read Bruce Caldwell) are not being picked up. But neither are journalists who are true public intellectuals, such as Virginia Postrel or Amity Shales, etc. And then there are the think-tank types -- Tom Palmer or David Boaz, they are neither scholars nor pure public intellectuals, but some mix of both within the confines of a think tank and are public policy engaged.

To me the complex division of labor involved in the intellectual structure of production is hard to sort out, and in the absense of relative prices and clear profit and loss signals, I am not sure that the allocation of intellectual talent is optimal or not.

So I am asking questions, not presuposing answers.

[Dave Prychitko]

Pete:

Also Jane Shaw and any number of others, using "Hayekian" broadly. Also, if textbook authors are considered public intellectuals (textbooks are certainly not a form of scholarship, although some now call it "the scholarship of application") and if the list included those who lived into this decade -- I would vote for Paul Heyne.

[Chris]

Dave, Maybe my understanding of the terms "scholarship" and "scholarly method" is anachronistic, but I didn't mean to include natural science.

I think natural science is a - no pun intended - naturally closed shop, as it's not something you can get into without being taught the (in some important respects non-arbitrary) basics. Economics, on the other hand, seems to be a kind of artificially closed shop, as the basics seems to be arbitrary or at least questionable, and the whole process of spending years playing with equations and fiddling around with utterly unrealistic models seems more like some strange, time-consuming and expensive initiation into a closed-off community than anything to be found in natural science.

Of course, I don't mean that all scholarship should be rejected. I was reacting to what seemed to be the implication by one or two people above that non-academic writing should be distrusted precisely because it is non-academic (at least in the case of economics). Peter has pointed out that I certainly misunderstood the comments.

But I still think economics is closed in a way that isn't healthy. An illustrative comparison here may be one between economics and programming. Programming is pretty complicated, but there are plenty of programmers respected by the programming community who are self-taught. The/a leading textbook on the ultra-academic Lisp programming language, for example, was written by someone with a degree in English lit. Can you imagine someone with a degree in English literature being taken seriously in the field of economics by the economics profession? Surely not. But I doubt Hayek on prices is more difficult to understand or communicate than Common Lisp. It's not a perfect comparison, but my point is that programming - which gave us the Web, Google, iPods, you name it - is an open shop, whereas economics - which gave us the grand total of one economist who credibly predicted the recent financial troubles, along with a lot of scholarship over the years - is a closed one, and that this relative performance surely relates to how open or closed each is.

[liberty]

Wow. I have to say that I agree completely with both Pete and Chris here.

I think the programming analogy is good. And I agree that there are true academic barriers that make sense in the hard sciences-- including "the basics" as well as lab methods, and so on. There are facts and methods that need to be learned for several years, and on which further research necessarily rests. It makes sense to have several years of training before one is able to make any real contribution.

In economics, it is not exactly the same. Many of the biggest contributors in the early years (and programming is young, so this may be an aspect to consider) were self-taught, widely read but "untrained" in the formal sense. We have not really moved beyond their basic insights, as a discipline. This is not to say that there have not been many contributions since then, but someone widely read in the classics, and in more recent contributions, but all self-taught, could still make major contributions if it was not a "closed shop."

Most good economics is easily accessible, and though it is surely useful to learn the "formal" techniques, most of us here would agree that the primary reason that this is useful is in order to find, investigate and expose their flaws.

This is a self-enforcing issue: it is only so long as we make it mandatory that these methods are learned that they will remain important to learn and combat. If we did not teach these invalid methods and techniques to students, they would likely fade away, since they are so completely disconnected from reality.

So, the closed shop is destroying the discipline, just as it destroys any industry's productivity.

On the other hand, I agree with Pete that we need to do both theoretical work, which can be difficult for the layperson to read and digest, as it is based on knowledge of specific writers and theories, as well as more public, digestible work; and that the quality of the latter depends strongly on the willingness to do good work in the former.

[Doug Thorson]

Pete:

I am not an economist and would not pretend to understand present myself as anything but an eternal student. But, if I may, here is my 2 cents worth.

The academic work that you folks do, as a science, is important, since it provides the empirical analysis and "proof" that the theories that the rest of us encounter in the text book are either valid, evolving or lies. Ultimately, those theories make their way into the public arena in the form of public policies. We can therefore follow a policy course in ignorance or with careful and wise evaluation. Thanks to the extensive work of folks like Thomas Sowell (although ignored, by and large, by most policy makers) the rest of us can benefit from his analysis and make our case, to elected officials, as to why course corrections must be made or why the policy maker should be removed from office.

As long as good economic studies remain in a "closed" system, the rest of us may continue to "follow the leader" into tyranny. Therefore, I make an appeal that both academic scholarship and a passionate course of general explanation of economic principles, in the public forum, should happily coexist so as to preserve the liberty that was envisioned by F. A. Hayek. If you don't do both, your voices will be eliminated from future consideration since your voice is the voice of individual liberty which is incompatible with tyranny.

Thanks for considering.

[Rafe Champion]

As someone said, it is apples and oranges and potatoes. There are too many publics. What public is Kirzner writing for? How wide is the scope of Easterly compared with Novak and Sowell. How did Pete Boettke and Dave get left off the list. And Roger Koppl.

There is a fundamental difference between scholarship and scholasticism (a form of normal science). There is also a difference between scholarship at the highest level and getting the ball over the advantage line. Some can do one and the other (Hayek, Mises, Popper) and write in clear language that is accessible to a lay audience as well. Tragically they had to do it all because they were so thin on the ground.

Everyone has to make a tricky decision about dong what they like, what they are best at and what most needs to be done given the state of play at the time. Of course that decision can change, Hayek and Mises lived long enough to have major career changes, and the state of the game changed as well, Hakek lived long enought to see a critical mass of followers so no single person has to do it all.

[Current]

How much of a closed shop is economics in practice. Consider someone who doesn't have an economics qualification or membership of an economics professional body. If that person wrote a good paper on something and submitted it to a journal what would happen?

[Steve Horwitz]

Assuming the journal is double-blind refereed and assuming the editor doesn't desk reject it, I'd think it would get a hearing on the merits. Assuming further that desk rejections are also based on a quick read of the contents, if the paper had merit, it would get refereed.

When I referee a paper for double-blind journals, I do not know who the author(s) is/are. You could be an engineer writing a paper on economics for all I know. If it's good, I recommend publication.

The hard part, and this is where the idea of expertise and the scientific community come in, is developing a deep enough knowledge of the techniques and literature without being part of the "guild." Graduate school and years of reading and writing DO create human capital that matters for how good of a contribution one can make. A non-economist, for example, might think she has a unique contribution when in fact it's been done before, but she didn't know it for not having had the deep exposure to the literature.

I certainly give negative referee reports on Austrian papers on a regular basis because the authors are unaware of previous Austrian contributions relevant to their argument. Such authors might be PhDs in economics or they might be "outsiders," I don't know. What I do know is that "insiders" are less likely to be unaware of the relevant literature than "outsiders."

Thus expertise matters. People can call themselves "Austrian economists" all they want, but unless you are really conversant with the various relevant scholarly contributions and communities, it is (or should be anyway) unlikely that you could get published in an Austrian or related journal. In THAT sense, economics (and Austrian economics) is a "closed shop", and that's the way it should be in a scholarly community.

Once one moves to other sorts of outlets (not the refereed journals and university presses), then matters are different and many more flowers will bloom, as well they should. The rules there are different.

[Current]

That all sounds quite reasonable. Not unlike engineering journals.

[James Oswald]

I just finished reading "The Other Path" and "The Mystery of Capital" by Hernando de Soto, and I was surprised by the number of Hayekian ideas in his work. I think I may be at risk of falling into Brian Caplan's "Hayek said the sky is blue" fallacy, so what do you think? Is de Soto considered Hayekian?