The essay is here. An excerpt:
There are many causal factors that affect human behavior and human interaction. As a result, “social science” is not nearly as reliable as physical science. We can speculate on what causes political and economic events, but we cannot prove our hypotheses. Experts may propose two or more differing theories, none of which can be definitively ruled out.
I think this is true but it is a corollary to a more fundamental truth; people tend to assume agency is the main factor causing most events. Agency can be supernatural as well as human.
Re: “The main reason that human behavior cannot be analyzed with scientific precision is that our behavior is affected by culture, which is complex and subject to rapid evolution. ”
And don’t forget individual free will!
This essay reminds me of Hayek who emphasized, much to the chagrin of “designers,” although readers of Kling need not be reminded, that some things in life are bigger than their ability to manage, and that we should not only recognize this reality, but also embrace it and learn from the results produced by “spontaneous order.” The pricing mechanism and language were Hayek’s prime examples. English is the lingua franca of the world not because the English imposed it or by any other conscious design. Designers can look quite ridiculous when they attempt to manage so many variables involved in natural cultural evolution. Try as they might, the French, many of whom would love to see French be the common tongue, couldn’t make that happen. When English started creeping into their own culture and country, the government was hopeless in passing laws to outlaw words like “le hot dog” from everyday use, though they tried.
Re: Causal density.
Even when causal density is low—for example, when there are only two mechanisms in play—there remains epistemic indeterminacy.
Jon Elster writes: “I define mechanisms as frequently occurring and easily recognizable causal patterns that are triggered under generally unknown conditions or with indeterminate consequences. […] In what I call type A mechanisms, the indeterminacy concerns which of several possible mechanisms will be triggered, e.g., sour grapes or forbidden fruits. In type B mechanisms, it concerns the net effect of several opposite mechanisms that are triggered simultaneously, such as the income effect and the substitution effect.”—”Indeterminacy of Emotional Mechanisms,” in Pierre Demeulenaere (ed.), Analytical Sociology and Social Mechanisms (Cambridge University Press 2011), 50-63, p. 50
Where there is epistemic indeterminacy about which mechanism will be triggered, or about the relative strengths of contrary mechanisms, we might be able to explain an outcome (after the fact), but we can’t predict it.
With a perspective coming from the STEM fields, I think of Type A mechanisms as non-linear systems and Type B mechanisms as complex systems.
Sometimes (often?) in social phenomena it looks like no mechanism was triggered, because strong mechanisms counteract each other. For example, if an election outcome matches pre-election polls, it looks like polls didn’t affect voters’ behaviors. However, it might be the case that polls triggered two strong (but roughly equally strong) mechanisms: the bandwagon effect and the underdog effect. In this case, the mechanisms (a) cause many people to vote differently, but (b) have little net effect because they counteract each other.
Even the immutable laws of the physical word describe trends which exist until, well, they don’t. Also, there is a “science” portion of social science. I know this because its in the title.
Yes, just like the Democratic Republic of Korea.
Your article on Cultural Intelligence in NA was going SO well until you wrote this nonsense:
“College campuses are centers of contempt for business and for cultural norms alike. There, prestige is accorded to those who denounce entire classes of people as villains and who claim to speak on behalf of other classes labeled as victims. It is ironic that our institutions of higher education are so often the sources or drivers of our contempt for these two institutions — the market and the family.”
Look, I get it, you hate liberal arts. Maybe you have a chip on your shoulder because too many people told you that economics wasn’t a science, I don’t know. But this whole “universities are leftist cesspools” schtick has got to go. Setting aside for the moment that most universities have a business school, and some a seminary school, I don’t know how you could classify the rest as “having contempt for business and social norms”.
Young entrepreneurs spring out of colleges every day. Young academics’ job is, and always has been, to challenge social and cultural norms, not to say contempt. They continue to do so the same way they did in the 60’s, and they in turn did it the same way they did back in the 20’s.
Here’s a quote from not too long ago which sounds eerily similar to yours:
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room.”
Oh wait, that was Socrates complaining about the same thing in the 4th century B.C.
Oh wait, that was a bogus quote attributed to Socrates. Well done.
My deepest apologies. Fortunately for my points, there are plenty of others to draw on:
“[Young people] are high-minded because they have not yet been humbled by life, nor have they experienced the force of circumstances.
…
They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it.”
Rhetoric, Aristotle
4th Century BC
Our sires’ age was worse than our grandsires’. We, their sons, are more worthless than they; so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt.
Book III of Odes, Horace
circa 20 BC
Youth were never more sawcie, yea never more savagely saucie . . . the ancient are scorned, the honourable are contemned, the magistrate is not dreaded.
The Wise-Man’s Forecast against the Evill Time, Thomas Barnes
1624
The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth; and prevented others from improving their minds in useful knowledge. Parents take care to feed their children with wholesome diet; and yet how unconcerned about the provision for the mind, whether they are furnished with salutary food, or with trash, chaff, or poison?
Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family, Reverend Enos Hitchcock
1790
And on and on
Source:
https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/7btv14/the_more_things_change_the_more_they_stay_the/
I think there is a timeless truth to the Aristotle quote. The other quotes demonstrate that curmudgeons never die, they just smell that way.
You might be surprised to learn that most “seminary schools” associated with universities are conventionally left, with more than a little distaste for markets.
Most universities do indeed have business schools. Students learn with an undertone of guilt, one reason so many successful business people eventually “morally launder” their money by giving some of it to the university.
Young academics’ job is, and always has been, to challenge social and cultural norms, not to say contempt.
In my utopia, it would be to find and transmit the truth.
Granted I have not traveled to visit many business schools, but I highly doubt the students are holding on to some form of guilt transmitted from the University. The role of the U is to make them professional entrepreneurs and business executives, so it is in the U’s best interest to not make them feel guilty about that.
I am coming from the perspective of having recently graduated after being in school for the better part of a decade and I can tell you that there is no systemic, insidious effort by the administration to scorn markets and hate tradition. It doesn’t work like that, since there are myriad individual actors who disagree with each other.
Being related to several people who work in universities and having spent a great deal of time there myself, I am fairly sure that in every selective university, there is a general culture that is more suspicious of markets and profit-making organizations than of non-profits and governments. It is “not as good” to spend your life in the former rather than the latter. More money and power should go to the latter and less to the former. Even students in business schools pick up on that.
It is in a university’s pecuniary interest to help people make money and also make them feel the need/desire/obligation to give a good deal of it to the university.
I acknowledge your point. If, as you agree, it is in the best interest of the U to have their graduates earn a lot of money, then it can’t be the case that they encourage graduates to take low status, non-profit positions that pay little.
In my graduate program for example, which is a public affairs school at a public university, they were very up front about the trade offs we would have to make by working in the non-profit versus private sector. At no point did I feel pressured to go one way or the other. In fact, our faculty consisted of both private sector and public sector adjuncts to provide a broad range of experience.
Conversely, what I don’t see being talked about here is conservative universities. the conversation Kling continues to bring up seems to hinge on the notion that, “younger people tend to be liberal, as they always have been. I don’t like that, so it must be the universities fault.” I think that is a silly argument to make. If students are not buying into conservative arguments, maybe you should change your arguments?
Conservative universities? You could probably count them all without taking off your socks 🙂
I would restate what students absorb in 4 years as, “it is morally better to work in a non-profit, but if you do go into business and make money, you should give back. One of the best ways of giving back is giving your alma mater money.
No one, not even right wing evangelical Christians, reacts with such utter indignation as young academics when you challenge their social norms. Academic leftists did indeed once (in the 60s) spend much time tearing things down, and now seem to imagine that’s what they’re still doing, when they’re mostly piling more and more stuff onto the heap. Seriously, there are circuitous new rules and customs being woven every day among student activists, and being retroactively enforced. It’s like watching a new religion being conceived in fast forward. Makes one almost miss the days when deconstruction was in vogue.
I think you’re far overstating the monolith of thought that you say exists on campus. Again, students have always played this role as they try to find their voice and position in the world. They are young adults who still don’t quite understand who they are, so its only natural that they would invent new rules to navigate their world. You overstate the political nature of this as if some wave of liberal conspiracy was turning all students on all campuses into leftist zealots; that is simply not the case.
Conversely, look at how the right reacted to people saying happy holidays, and starbucks changing their cups during christmas time. Absolutely lost their minds in reactionary fervor. The difference is, they were all adults.
But really, can you not see how, to anyone not on the left, the moment you set foot on campus, it looks like a leftist camp. “Well they also have veterinary school and the kids drink more than they protest.” Go to a Jesus camp, you’ll find they eat meals, swim in lakes, make macaroni pictures, it’s not all prayer and hymns; mostly not in fact. That doesn’t make it not decidedly Christian, and not a very comfortable place for a secular person to spend his time (or put such a person at ease about the prospect of having to help fund Jesus camp).
These 3 help me understand some of my own K-12 experiences.
1. Dunbar. When we had a high school of 200 kids – pretty close to Dunbar 150 – we had peak caring. But when we added a middle school and then an elementary – went to 1250 total – cooperation and morality became far more complicated.
2. Causal density. We created a particular type of math tutoring. We were able to scale it to a few other cities, and perhaps 500 full-time tutors. Economists did RCTs. Huge gains. But then others tried to run the tutoring idea without elite managers, and those gains disappeared.
Seems like same is true with investments in pre-K. RCTs of the little experiments show large gains. Large scale replications in Quebec and Tennessee show zero gain.
3. Emergence vs design. Most schools create rules/policies but don’t account for emergence of “The real culture.” If they allowed for emergence, they’d protect way more capacity towards “tending the garden” of what emerges, watering the good stuff and weeding the bad stuff. That’s what great schools do.
2. is, of course, Arnold’s null hypothesis.
“If it were up to me, the term “social science” would disappear. We would replace it with another term.”
This is an ahistorical view of the word “science” that also risks over-endowing the objectivity and reliability of natural sciences.
Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still are overblown,
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own
-Shakespeare
I don’t think it’s the complexity of causes so much as the adaptability and unpredictability of social behavior. A culture is an organism whose genome has a very high mutation rate, evolves both in a Darwinian manner and in a Lamarckian manner, is constantly experimenting with new habitats, and most annoyingly, can notice that it’s being studied and change in response to what the scientist has found, rendering the findings moot. And you’re studying it from inside of it.