Steven Landsburgh, author of More Sex is Safer Sex – The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics, wrote a piece in the WSJ on June 9th entitled “A Brief History of Economic Time”. You have to forgive the rather dismissive tone of his reading of human history but he sums up his main argument neatly in a final pragraph: “Engineers figure out how to harness the power of technology; economists figure out how to harness the power of incentives. Our prosperity depends on both”. Oh dear, here we go again. The push to see the world only as advancing through economic and technological forces (with culture presumably lagging behind as the by-product) is relentless. No only does this reading push human endeavor into distinct (but imaginary) competing categories but it elevates economics (a social science, lest we forget) to unprecedented heights of insight and application. Funny, I remember my undergrad economics classes as being rather less than precise, despite all the mathematical jiggery-pokery, when it came to predicting human behavior. All this I could forgive but the reduction of human endeavor and culture to the purely technological and economic realms does little to help us understand some of the real problems we face or even the real joys of life.
This is, of course, rather typical of discourse on human development. But all ideas, (and ultimately our evolution and development, yes even our economic development is about ideas), are not the product of engineering or economic initiatives. Humans problem solve; it’s how we are wired. That we can solve some problems for the long-term and move onto new problems without having to rely only on our genetic transfer is another very human attribute. This is where the human record of knowledge plays a fundamental role. Through it we have accelerated the problem solving process. We have refined our knowledge into a transferable form and enabled a human to survey the world and its development through time. Does it make sense to consider libraries, museums, writings, and the internet as just engineering proposals enabled through economics? Perhaps one could distort their meanings to this interpretation but I am certain this is not the sense in which Steven Landsburg is using the terms – he seems to actually believe it’s all about engineering and economics as typically practiced. More likely this is again the reduction of culture to simple forces. Economics does matter, but economics is having a devilishly hard time figuring out information. And just what sort of economic argument can you make for works of art (other than their retail value to some collectors) that truly reflects what art means in human existence. Information is about meaning, and human meaning-making is complicated, nuanced and driven by more than concerns with costs and incentives. This is not to understate the value of incentives to our understanding of behavior but there are many studies of humans that reveal the a priori identification of incentives is problemmatic and one risks circularity by invoking the likely incentive only after the fact. There are few voices for this, and it complicates the simple reduction, so it is no wonder that economists get the ears of politicians and the newspaper editors. Too complicated? Well just think about HMO’s — the perfect marriage of incentives and medical engineering.