|Peter Boettke|
Methodological straightjackets usually kill creative thought. Scholars need to be able to look at the world through different windows to bring new perspectives to bear on pressing problems. As McCloskey has taught for over a generation, if you shine your flashlight over there to illuminate, you necessarily leave in the dark the reality over there away from the beam of light. Your eyes will only be directed at what is illuminated, but what if the answer to your questions lies over there which is still in the dark?
Elinor Ostrom was one of the great champions of what she called "multiple-methods methodology". She insisted that you had to master a disciplinary method first, but then you needed to have an open attitude and seek out gains from intellectual exchange. Her attitude was so refreshing because in modern economics that standard rhetoric was one of accepting only a very narrow set of tools and approaches as scientific.* To use a phrase from McCloskey again, the intellectual range seemed to be restricted from M-to-N. When we get close and look at it, it appears to be very diverse, but if we step back just 1 step, we will see that the discipline doesn't deal with the range of ideas and methods from Alchian-Buchanan-Coase all the way to Ostrom-V. Smith-Tullock-Yeager-Williamson.
But perhaps that is changing; and we are witnessing a change for the better, not motivated by philosophical musings about the nature of science, but instead just by the natural curiosity of scholars to understand human action in all aspects of life. Andrei Shleifer provides an outstanding survey to honor Matthew Gentzkow's 2014 J B Clark Medal. After walking his readers through the various contributions of Gentzkow's and his colleagues work on a variety of topics, Shelfier concludes with this sentiment about the future of economic research:
After rereading Matt’s papers, and reading some for the first time, I am struck by his openness to different ways of doing economics. He has an uncanny ability to rely on different approaches, depending on what the problem he is considering calls for. Sometimes he uses quasi-experimental evidence to identify the effects he is interested in; other times he estimates full structural models. Some papers deal with small data sets; others rely on frontier big data techniques. Several of the papers contain practical econometric advances that have become useful to subsequent researchers. Sometimes Matt uses the simplest models that only summarize the verbal ideas; other papers, such as the work on persuasion, contain significant contributions to economic theory. Much of his work is extremely neoclassical, but some is behavioral as well. Some papers deal with abstract conceptual issues; others are solidly grounded in practical concerns, including regulatory ones.
This range is admirable not just for its own sake. My sense is that when areas of economics conclude that there is only one correct way of analyzing a problem, they stagnate. Our discipline is not far enough along to settle down in this way. Openness to new ways of doing things is essential for making progress. I would go further and conjecture that such openness is the hallmark of 21st century economics. The fact that Matthew Gentzkow along with his remarkable collaborators and several other recent winners of the John Bates Clark Medal embrace such openness is both a testimony to their talents and very good news for our field. (emphasis added)
Note in Shlefier's reading, it is not just topic choice, but method of analysis that varies. It is my sincere hope that he is right and that the discipline will be more pluralistic methodologically, analytically and ideologically over the next 25 years of my career than it has in the first 25 years.
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*One of the many great strengths of George Mason University has been the educational exposure from the founding of its PhD program to "multiple-methods" of scientific economics. As Bob Tollison once told a rather obnoxious detractor at a public lecture in the mid 1980s -- 'At George Mason, we have at least 2 strong scientific traditions and your comment to the contrary is not acceptable here.' Tollison the quintessential applied neoclassical economists and political economists understood and respected the Austrian-subjectivism and the property-rights institutionalism as well as the constitutional political economy and liberal social philosophy that was evident in the various scholars at GMU at that time who worked at the Center for the Study of Market Processes and the Center for Study of Public Choice. Years later, Vernon Smith would move the Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science to GMU and he too would embrace the methodological diversity of GMU with its Austrian economists, its institutionalist economists, its public choice economists, its philosophical economists, its historical economists, and its intellectual history economists. There are still detractors who don't know what they speak about because they choose to focus only on 1 or 2 of the traditions that students are exposed to at GMU and think that is all they know. But our students are exposed to standard theory, standard applied techniques, they also can pursue agent based modeling, they can specialize in experimental economics, as well as Austrian economics, public choice economics, and law and economics. In fact, some of the most productive work is done at the intersection of all these traditions and approaches. On the margin that matters most for the sort of intellectual creativity that Shleifer is talking about, GMU has been a trail blazer since the 1980s when the program was founded. Buchanan's call to "Dare to Be Different" was right along these lines, and we have --- and continue to be -- bold enough to dare to be different. If others are moving in that direction, and away from the production of those "Kelly-Green Golf Shoes" that McCloskey identified as the Samuelsonian, then so much the better for our discipline and for our understanding of the world around us.