Stop Me Before I Blog Again

Remember in my last entry, how I spoke of not feeling as if I was a PhD student? Well, scratch that. I've been submerged in economics for the past few weeks, and I'm only now coming up for air. My last midterm of this semester was today, in econometrics. All in all, although I haven't received any grades for any of the midterms, I'm already disappointed in my performance on them. I feel like I could have done better, but I'm not sure how. Paradoxically, though, I don't feel as thought I've reached the limits of my capabilities. I guess I'm just going to start studying more efficiently.

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While I was gone the Nobel Prize in Economics* was awarded to Paul Krugman. It's sort of funny, because the week before, I was assuring some of my colleagues that he would never win a Nobel Prize. Just more evidence of my profound ignorance of economics. I'm a big fan, actually, of Krugman. He's among the best economics writers out there, and his popular writing in economics is clear for the layperson, but even enlightening for academics. I have a couple of compilations of his columns and articles, and each of them is very good. Of course, not his popular press columns, but his academic work for which he won the Nobel Prize. One of the two pillars of his economic project is "the new economic geography", and that's the work of his with which I am most familiar, because of my interests in urban and spatial economics. He helped write the standard introductory graduate text on the subject (you can read the introduction here). Anyway, this has been a long introduction to a relatively simple point, which that Krugman became interested in economics for precisely the same reason I ended up falling in love with it - science fiction novels, specifially, the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. Krugman, from "Incidents From My Career":

Admittedly, there were those science fiction novels. Indeed, they may have been what made me go into economics. Those who read the stuff may be aware of the classic Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov. It is one of the few science fiction series that deals with social scientists -- the "psychohistorians", who use their understanding of the mathematics of society to save civilization as the Galactic Empire collapses. I loved Foundation, and in my early teens my secret fantasy was to become a psychohistorian. Unfortunately, there's no such thing (yet). I was and am fascinated by history, but the craft of history is far better at the what and the when than the why, and I eventually wanted more. As for social sciences other than economics, I am interested in their subjects but cannot get excited about their methods -- the power of economic models to show how plausible assumptions yield surprising conclusions, to distill clear insights from seemingly murky issues, has no counterpart yet in political science or sociology. Someday there will exist a unified social science of the kind that Asimov imagined, but for the time being economics is as close to psychohistory as you can get.

I don't have much to add to Krugman's comments on Foundation, except that the imaginary "psychohistory" has the scientific rigor, importance, and predictability that economics wishes it had (and sometimes pretends to have). The psychohistorians of Asimov's Foundation were able to model human behavior on the long-run macro scale with all the exactitude and precision of Newtonian physics; able to predict the evolution of society. They always seem to have perfect data, and they are able to rescue their models even when some of their fundamental assumptions go awry. Barring some miracle or cataclysmic paradigm shift, we'll not get something even approaching psychohistory in my lifetime (or ever), but I can think of worse ways to spend my working than trying to sketch out a first approximation.

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Although I have had a lot of work to do, and little time or intellectual capital to spend on things not directly related to my classes, I've tried to maintain vestiges of other pursuits. It's hard to find time to sit down and read for an extended period of time, so I've been reading longer articles and essays. Here are some of my recent favorites:

George Orwell - "Notes on Nationalism" and "Politics and the English Language" - These are both classic essays by Orwell - clear, insightful, and timeless. They are both extremely relevant for our current rhetorical and political environment, and I highly recommend both of them. The most salient part of Notes on Nationalism is the first part, which discusses the impulse in general. The second half, in which he categorizes prevalent types of nationalism, is more of a historical interest. 

David Foster Wallace - Federer as Religious Experience - Since his death a few weeks ago, I've been revisiting a lot of his old essays and articles. This article in particular does something at which DFW was unparalleled - elevating and broadening a subject of limited interest to a general audience (in this case, tennis), to something universal, profound, and enlightening. He did this not by taking a laypersons attitude, but submerging himself in the details and nuances of the subject, by observing a series of little things and drawing lines between then, a sort of lyrical pointillism that illuminates at the same time that it informs. (Also, if you haven't, you should go read his 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, probably the only commencement speech worth reading.)

Jeffery Goldberg - The Things He Carried - A quirky, funny, frightening piece in The Atlantic about the bumbling trainwreck that is airport security. He shows how someone with even a minimal level of intelligence and forethought can exploit the gaping holes in airport security, and ultimately concludes that we'd probably be better off spending the majority of the funding for TSA elsewhere, if we're really interested in stopping terrorism. 

George Packer - The Hardest Vote - Packer uses the 2008 presidential campaign as a frame for talking about the cynicism and disillusionment of the working class. Sympathetic and touching, but without the condescending pity that sometimes pervades these types of articles. Packer approaches the subject brilliantly, simply set up the historical and sociopolitical context, then essentially allow his subjects (the white working class in Ohio) to tell their stories with a minimum of punditry. Their story turns out sad, even depressing, but not without hope. A useful corrective to the frothy, ignorant rantings of the commentariat during this political season.

I think I had more to say, but I think this entry is too long already. If you've made it all the way to the end, I admire your perseverance.

*This isn't a "real" Nobel Prize, as it wasn't one of the five originally established by Alfred Nobel. It is actually officially called "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel", although most people just call it "The Nobel Prize in Economics". I don't see that the distinction is especially important or substantive.