How Cool is Cambridge?

Extremely cool.

I get asked a lot by family and friends about what would be my favorite place to teach if I could pick anyplace in the world.  I spent a little over a year at Stanford, and the combination of beautiful weather, California life style and the intellectual vibrancy and resources at Stanford are hard to beat. I was at NYU for 8 years, and the village is amazing and NYC is the greatest city in the world.  However, I usually suprise people because I am a New Jersey boy at heart and so my standard answer is Oxford University provided it was at the NJ shore.  Unfortunately, Monmouth University hasn't developed into Oxford, and Oxford hasn't got any relocation plans. (If plans are made on either front please contact me immediately!!!) 

So I remain for the time being content at GMU in Northern Virginia.  You know we do have our Nobel Prize winners in econmics, and a great basketball coach and team, and people on the faculty don't consider me insane for my Austrian and libertarian dispositions (it is always a good thing to not being considered insane by your colleagues).  GMU is an excellent environment filled with interesting students and colleagues.

But after visiting Cambridge, I'd consider that as well if a geographic switch to the Atlantic Highlands in NJ were ever in the offering.  Cambridge is an amazing environment for learning with its beautiful buildings and lush lawns.  I might still prefer Oxford, but certainly you cannot go wrong with Cambridge.  And certainly the intellectual atmosphere for economics and the social sciences is more dynamic in Cambridge than in Oxford --- though the PPE program at Oxford is a desirable model.

I have given talks at Cambridge twice. The first time in 2004 to the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, and on this past Monday October 23, 2006 to the Critical Realism Workshop in the Center for the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanites.  The Critical Realism Workshop is directed by Tony Lawson -- one of the most creative and dynamic voices among heterodox economists in the world.  I gave my paper "Comparative Historical Political Economy: An Old Research Program for a Modern Age" (co-authored with Pete Leeson and Chris Coyne) to an audience of over 30 of faculty and graduate students and I got great critical feedback and encouragament on how to improve the paper. (this paper will be available for distribution shortly) It was a great experience.

But how could it not be great?  Lawson is someone who thinks seriously about foundational issues, and so do his colleagues and students, and we were at Cambridge University, the intellectual home of: Marshall, Keynes, Robinson, Sraffa and Wittgenstein.

     

Any economist interested in the philosophical foundations of the discipline of political economy must visit Cambridge at least once. They will not find the great figures above walking the lawns but their tradition of thinking seriously about politics, philosophy, economics and the history of ideas is alive and well at the Tony Lawson workshop on Critical Realism and his study group on social ontology.  It was a great privilege for me to speak to this group and to witness the intellectual vibrancy that is evident with this research group.

Comments

[Gabriel M.]

Sraffa... without the "c".

[Peter Boettke]

Thanks for the catch on the typo.

[Rafe Champion]

In 1972 I had a friend in Cambridge for a while. When she kicked me out I had to go up the road and spend a couple of nights on the floor of a friend in Kings College before returning to base in London. At least Kings served a better breakfast. The Kings man was a philosopher and one of his colleagues introduced me to Spiro Latsis in a pub by the Cam. Spiro's father was a shipping magnate and he funded two conferences in the Greek Islands to explore the implications of the thoughts of Lakatos for economists. Nothing much emerged but I bet they had a good time.

Cambridge is full of history, not just in philosophy and the humanities but also in science from Newton to the double helix. Leonard Woolf (spouse of Virginia) wrote some wonderful memoires of his time in Cambridge and his friendship with Keynes and others of great note. Maybe things have changed but a few years ago they had just about the most obscurantist course in philosophy of over 200 worldwide that I checked on the net.

Liam Hudson also wrote a beautiful memoire of his time in philosophy and psychology at Oxford and Cambridge, a very revealing account of induction into reductionism and behaviourism, the inculcation of railway lines of thought that resulted in a lot of psychology that had next to nothing to do with living human beings.

"As in all systems of social snobbery, participants are under continual pressure to appear, indeed to become, what they are not. Research problems tend as a consequence, in psychology at least, to be tackled in a manner which is more artificial than either common sense or logic would dictate. Each problem is ‘promoted’ until it reaches its own level of methodological inappropriateness. The social psychologist, a creature of low status, acquires higher status by being an experimental social psychologist, and working in a laboratory fitted out with booths and one-way screens. And he can achieve higher status still, in the eyes of his colleagues if not of the academic community at large, by abandoning the study of man altogether, and joining the packed ranks of the methodologists. He then criticizes ineptitudes in experiments conducted by others. He speculates, like the country divine, on how good work might be done, but never risks the doing for himself."

"In such a situation, prejudices are potent. And they are particularly so, in science as elsewhere, for being implicit. The tough look down on the tender, but unless hard-pressed, deny that they do so. If cornered, they point to the unfortunate fact that, among psychologists, it is the weaker students who specialize in the more humane branches: those with lower seconds, young ladies with an interest in people. It follows, the tough point out with evident regret, that standards are lower in the more humane fields. The argument is a tricky one to combat, especially as it prophecies are self-fulfilling. As teachers and examiners, the tough-minded are in a position to give their own assumptions weight. With minds as open as any can be, they design courses and set papers that favour candidates whose style of intelligence suits them to experimental research. They thus operate a self-perpetuating social system. And being men of good faith and sociological naivety, they are free to deny that they do so. The more tender-minded know that a form of snobbery is being exercised at their expense, yet cannot convince themselves that it is groundless. They feel not merely embarrassed, but embarrassed about feeling embarrassed. And there are few more potent mechanisms for ensuring that a particular type of research is not done; or, if it is done, that it is not done well."

http://www.the-rathouse.com/LiamHudson.html

Reminds you of some schools of economics!