Daniel Kaufman – What Is Social Science?
The Glenn Show
Glenn Loury
4.8 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 20 May 2022
⏱️ 75 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week’s episode is a throwback to 2015, when Daniel Kaufman, professor of philosophy at Missouri State University, editor of the online magazine the Electric Agora, and (at that time) a mainstay on bloggingheads.tv and meaningoflife.tv, invited me onto his show Sophia. I stumbled across this video again last month, and I think it remains an illuminating discussion that addresses some fundamental questions about economics and the social sciences.
We begin by discussing the “science” part of the social sciences. I explain that we economists tend not to philosophize about our discipline as much as other social scientists. But many major economic thinkers (think Keynes, Marx, and others) elaborate concepts that do ask fundamental questions about the nature of economics. To call a discipline a “science” implies that its findings are testable and replicable, that its insights are able to predict future conditions from present conditions. Does economics do that? I argue that it does. Of course, since much economic data is drawn from real-world behavior rather than controlled experiments, it can be difficult to isolate variables in a way that would satisfy, say, a physicist. This is because markets exist within particular cultures and under particular social arrangements that are not themselves purely economic in nature. And cultural values are going to affect, at least to some extent, how people behave within markets. The idea that people will try to maximize utility in a rational way is important to economics, but of course we know that humans often behave in ways that seem irrational. How does economics incorporate irrationality into its methodology? And finally, Dan and I were speaking at a time when the (still ongoing) replication crisis was all over the news. Is replication as seemingly dire a problem in economics as it is in psychology?
Dan’s training in philosophy helps him to ask some really deep questions here, and I think you can tell I relished the opportunity to answer them. Love to know what you think about this “classic” episode.
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5:44 How scientific are the social sciences?
11:20 Glenn defends the reliability of economic predictions
29:47 The strengths and weaknesses of “natural experiments”
36:48 How much does culture affect economic behavior?
50:06 New insights from behavioral economics
58:12 Dan: We trust the social sciences too much
Links and Readings
Dan’s website, the Electric Agora
The Electric Agora on YouTube
Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir’a book, Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit glennloury.substack.com/subscribe
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hi, this is Glenn Lowry at The Glenn Show, formerly at bloggingheads.tv, now at Substack.com |
| 0:10.8 | and at our YouTube channel, Glenn Lowry Show. |
| 0:15.3 | This week is a walk down memory lane for me actually. |
| 0:22.1 | I came across while doing some research, an old conversation I had with Daniel Kaufman |
| 0:29.0 | and Daniel is a philosopher. He's a philosopher who studies methodology and philosophy of the social sciences and he and I, in 2015, a long time ago, I grant you, had a wonderful conversation around the question, basically, is economics a science. |
| 0:50.4 | Now as an economist, I'd like to think that we are scientific but economics is not physics and I'm fully aware of that. |
| 0:58.1 | Daniel and I explore the intricacies of where the scientific and social scientific projects intersect. |
| 1:09.3 | It's a good conversation. I learned a lot from it and was reminded of that when I reviewed this recently and decided that I would share |
| 1:19.2 | the benefit of this conversation with you. Daniel is a long time contributor to the bloggingheads podcast platform that Robert Wright has led for more than a decade and that's where I got my start. |
| 1:36.3 | All the more reason to share with you the benefits of my conversation with Daniel. So I hope you enjoy it. |
| 1:44.8 | Well, Glenn Lowry, it is really a pleasure to have you on the Sophia program on bloggingheads and you don't really need much of an introduction, although you're not in your normal place and maybe say, you know, two seconds something about yourself and where you are right now. |
| 2:03.6 | I'm Glenn Lowry. I close the glenshow at bloggingheads.tv so people who come to the site often may have seen my face before. I'm a professor at Brown University, professor of economics and the social sciences there. |
| 2:18.2 | But this year I'm once about a colleague in Stanford, California at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, which is a semi-autonomous institution located on Stanford's campus that. |
| 2:32.7 | Houses, scholars like myself who are away from their normal positions for a year to undertake their writing projects and so on. |
| 2:40.7 | I'm in this idyllic setting. It's very beautiful and it's almost like paradise and one wonders how one stays focused on getting one's work done when you're in such a place. |
| 2:51.5 | I mean, you know, there's a beautiful swimming pool in back of my apartment that I can swim in pretty much every day and there's, you know, |
| 2:59.5 | fresh fruits and vegetables everywhere. The wine I'm told is not half bad and they're hiking trails and everybody's on a bicycle. |
| 3:09.1 | You know, everybody is half my age, including the people who are 10 years older than me. |
| 3:15.5 | So are you actually working on a scholarly monograph right now? What's your what's your project? |
| 3:20.5 | Okay, so I had to make each of us there about 36 fellows here for the year. This is a huge operation. |
| 3:28.5 | And each of us was given 10 minutes to explain to our colleagues what we're doing that took three days mornings, you know, 36 people 10 minutes apiece. |
| 3:40.5 | So this that's part of our part of our orientation process here here and from each other. |
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