Tyler Cowen — Are anthropologists better than you think?

IT's not often that I agree with Tyler Cowen, but here's where I do.

Many economists like to dump on their fellow social scientists, and personally I find that reading anthropology is often quite uninspiring. That said, I would like to say a small bit on the superiority of anthropologists. I view the “products” of anthropology as the experiences, world views, and conversations of the anthropologists themselves. Those products translate poorly into the medium of print, and so from a distance the anthropologists appear to be inferior and lackluster (I wonder to what extent the anthropologists realize this themselves?). 

Yet anthropologists have some of the most profound understandings of the human condition. They have witnessed, absorbed, and processed some of the most interesting data, especially those anthropologists who do fieldwork of the traditional kind. 

The rest of us are simply (usually) too blind to see this. It even can be argued that anthropology is the queen and most general of the social sciences, and that economics, as a social science, is simply playing around in one of the larger anthropologically-motivated sandboxes, namely the economy.

Without some familiarity with anthropology, a person is likely to overgeneralize about human nature and the human condition based on personal introspection and one's social embedding in the web of a particular culture as a complex network arising in response to changing historical and geographical conditions. 

The assumption of neoclassical economic about representative agents, rationality, and utility as fundamental concepts in a general theory provide evidence of such credulity. 

These assumptions rest on a particular worldview constructed of particular views of human nature and the human condition that are too limited to apply even to the societies that economists attempt to model. 

To then conclude that economic "laws" are laws of nature similar to the laws of physics is unwarranted. Familiarity with anthropology also shows how the foundational assumption that such assumptions are universal laws is implausible.

Or take Adam Smith's commodity theory of money based on barter that was adopted by most economists as intuitively correct to A. Mitchell Innes's credit theory of money based on social reciprocity of obligation, later fleshed out with evidence in economic anthropologist David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years.

Cowen observes that "the rest of us are simply (usually) too blind to see this." Being embedded in a social system results in cognitive-volitional-affective-perceptual and even physical biases that are difficult to detect other than through contrast. This is a reason that "travel is broadening." 

Moreover, anthropology provides insight into cultures and social systems that often stand in stark contrast to one's own, enabling the curious to compare assumptions in order to discover similarities and differences. Humans are similar biologically, but diverse culturally, sometime holding vastly divergent worldviews.

Philosopher of language Ludwig Wittgenstein was guided in part in developing his later views on the logic of language by anthropology. His early work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was based on the assumption that the logic of language could be articulated in much the same way as mathematics. He later came to realize, prompted in part by his interaction at Cambridge with Frank Ramsey and Piero Sraffa, that he had been focusing on a special case, namely the logic of description that underlies science and that the logic of ordinary language is far more complex and therefore cannot be articulated in the way he had assumed. It can only be done through examples that elucidate various structures of rules using what he called "language games."

Perhaps economics is at a similar impasse and needs to recognize that its earlier efforts had to do with delineating stylized special cases based on assumptions that are not universal and that there is no general case economic theory capable of discovering the universal laws of economic in complex emergent systems that both are subject to uncertainty and develop rapidly through technological innovation. Once that road is recognized as a dead-end, then economists will move on, as some already have been doing.

Marginal Revolution
Are anthropologists better than you think?
Tyler Cowen | Holbert C. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and serves as chairman and general director of the Mercatus Center