By Gabriel Martinez, Apr 15, 2009 in Pedagogy and Teaching
Today, Tax Day, might be a good day to point out that economics majors are not accountants. I can’t balance your checkbook. What I can do is help you apply your reason to the ordinary business of life.
Economics has then as its purpose firstly to acquire knowledge for its own sake, and secondly, to throw light on practical issues. But though we are right before entering on any study to consider carefully what are its uses, we should not plan out our work with direct reference to them. (Marshall, 1890, p. 94)
Knowledge advances, in part, because we purposefully ignore the use to which our knowledge will be put. But purposefully ignoring our purpose is a dangerous thing. It exposes us to the jocularity of our cousins at family gatherings; it gets us called parasites and failures in financial newspapers; it gets us called the Enlightenment-spawned, rationalistic pseudo-scholars of selfishness, materialism, and greed. In the pursuit of truth, so much the better!
I do not then blame the Political Economist for anything which follows from the very idea of his science, from the very moment that it is recognized as a science. … Given that wealth is to be sought, this and that is the method of gaining it. This is the extent to which a Political Economist has a right to go. (Newman, Idea, p. 65-66)
The very habit that ensures our success spells our disaster: we teach our students to look upon facts, to abstract and generalize, to draw conclusions and confirm hypotheses; to fix their mind upon their subject … “till [they have] forgotten there are subjects of thought higher and more heavenly than it” (Newman, Idea, p. 67). We claim for our subject a moral quality, we teach that it is a superior system of ethics, and we argue that the world would be better if we were all economists. We proclaim that the solution to all the world’s ills, from poverty and malnutrition to violence and irreligion, is increased GDP per capita. But the economist “has no right to determine that wealth is at any rate to be sought, or that it is the way to be virtuous and the price of happiness” (Newman, Idea, p. 66).
Newman criticizes the economics profession not because it is wrong, but because it is right. Economics says things that are true. The facts are well-collected, the logic is impeccable, and the intentions are good. And ... precisely because it is true, it is "able to instill what is false" (Newman, Idea, p. 69).
I am not denying, I am granting, I am assuming, that there is reason and truth in the [views] of scientific men; I only say that, though they speak truth, they do not speak the whole truth; that they speak a narrow truth, and think it a broad truth; that their deductions must be compared with other truths, which are acknowledged to be truths, in order to verify, complete, and correct them. (Newman, Idea, p. 70-71)
How can we manage this verification, completion, correction, if we do our research and teaching in four-year vacation camps attached to various teaching academies, set up to finance research institutes? These teaching centers have little connection with each other besides a common administration. Where is the University that is "an Alma Mater, knowing her children one by one, not a foundry, or a mint, or a treadmill" (Idea, p. 109)?
