Our ancestors thousands of years ago knew that if they really wanted to understand the heavens, they would have to sit down and carefully count some things. By a few centuries ago, such painstaking efforts had yielded an impressive understanding of dozens of other subjects. By the twentieth century, the virtues of counting to understand would seem to have long been established.
Ordinary people are far more interested in the social world around them than they are in most of the arcane topics to which counting was first applied. And yet, social science didn’t really start to count in ernest until the twentieth century. Why? Here are some possible theories:
- We thought we already understood the social world as well as we needed.
- Social science is just very hard – simple counting yields far fewer
useful insights than in other fields. So social counting had to wait
until we could do it on a massive scale. - The subject was taboo because we thought that a better social science would mainly just let some people take more advantage of others – there were few net benefits.
- We held strong opinions on social topics, but at some level knew many of them to be false. Social science was taboo for fear of confronting our self-deceptions about the social world.
I lean toward #4. Comments are open.
Are you saying that political correctness is older than social science? That can’t be right (but is what #4 essentially says). I go with #2 and the added fact that it took awhile to realize that counting produces “some” real insights, i.e. you can only get so far with philosophizing and waving of hands. In the science-sciences the same realization took place much earlier.
I’m inclined to #2 as well. As any historian knows, it’s devilishly hard to get *any* useful quantitative measures of a demographic or social-statistics nature prior to the 20th century. Ben Wattenberg even called the 20th century “the first measured century”!
One of the real treasures of our country’s government is the census data and the associated pubs, that go back to the early 19th century: the census bureau has even gone to the trouble of reprinting (in PDF form) the “Statistical Abstracts” going all the way back to the beginning…wow!
Learning. The 3rd loop.
Means, dispersions and variances are interesting for natural phenomena because they don’t change qualitatively but only quantitatively. If we take a large enough sample and propose various functions, we’re sure to end up with a good fitting; good for forecasting.
The problem with learning systems is that they vary not only their qualitative structure (the value of the parameters of the model) but also the functions of the model itself… trying to fit a function (e.g. with a minimum sum of squared distances from the function to the samples) makes no sense if there is no underlying function we want to discover.
People learn. And then everything goes meta. Consider Rothbard’s forecasting paradox: if I “catch” human behavior is a model, and it tells me when the market will peak, then this science would be used by a lot of people to delay/hurry their sales… therefore the peak will change because of our actions… and so on.
If a constant of human behaviour is public knowledge, some people will try to exploit it and, more importantly, other/most people will learn from it and change their behavior.
Broadly speaking I think Confucious was social science. I’m not sure if he counted things though. Probably someone in China did. I do seem to remember that the first-ever use of statisitcs were births and deaths in London … maybe I’m on the wrong vibe (and a layman to boot) but when I read Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk some of the history seemd “social.”
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0471295639/102-8546628-9060923
Definitely #2. In fact, I would say that #2 is still an issue, and it is still difficult to get definitive results out of social sciences. We’re making improvements, but we’re not nearly to the point where we can be as rigorous as “hard” sciences.
Also, whenever a scientific result comes out that offends some group of people, it gets squashed or heavily attacked. Which is, I guess a variation on #4.
It seems a little silly to ask people what their opinions are on this when you could do an empirical study…
Oops, I meant better studied more qualitatively…
There’s a number 5 here, or are we up to 8? There are technology issues that we are just getting around to overcoming – the technology wasn’t there until recently to collect the statistically valid data that’s accurate and useful (what was life like before telephone polling?). And the technology we have developed still isn’t as accurate as the natural sciences – our census data is still for the most part averages and estimations. Polling, while useful, only goes so far, loses value just days/weeks after the poll has been completed, and can turn out to be dead wrong. And, the data that is collected isn’t necessarily true or truthful – people lie all the time in polls and surveys. Beliefs, values, behaviors, etc., are just very difficult to quantify and the data is really hard to capture. It’s a very different kind of science.
I’ll vote for #2, and for jb’s addition. Social systems are full of feedback loops, some positive and some negative, some large and some small, with wildly varying differences in the time lags. Even with the best of modern statistical technique, we tend to be measuring the reactions at specific points in the loops, rather than describing the loops themselves.
Can we really say that Smith, Marx, Locke, and Colbert were really “social scientists”? They came up with excellent theories, but did not have much access to hard data to back them up.
It isn’t science until you collect the facts and show they support your hypothesis. Until then, you are doing speculation.
There’s a lot of #2, with a caveat of #7(?), that science itself wasn’t all that consistent at the counting/quantifying thing until late in the 19th century. You can point to counter examples, but mainly because so many of the counter counter examples have disappeared because they’re bleeding useless.
I would also argue that, outside of economics, there’s not a lot of good science going on in social science. Political science in particular is filled with people who think they’re doing science but despite endless (mis)readings of Kuhn and Popper, don’t funadamentally have good scientific literacy. They don’t really understand the process and aren’t willing to accept that there are only certain questions that can be answered in the absence of controlled, double-blind experiments.
Pedagogy only woke up to this fact within the past ten years. Psychology is doing much better. I’m not as familiar with anthropology, but I haven’t seen anything to make me suspect they’re much ahead of the game.
I think the Rutherford explanation is best: people with orderly, organized minds are naturally drawn to pursuits in which order is more apparent like physics, chemistry, and mathematics. They further are inclined to impose their own internal order on these exterior studies.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t social scientists with orderly, organized minds. But not only are their disciplines messier but there’s years of accumulated mess from those who don’t have orderly, organized minds imposing their own internal disorder on already-complex phenomena.
Mr. Econotarian et al:
If you read Smith, Marx, etc., you will find they contain a lot of facts. Both began with historical and direct observations, and are generally considered today to have been very astute observers of their times. Which is one reason why many of their theories are widely accepted today.
But I don’t want to start an argument about what makes a scientist — I largely just meant that Smith, Marx, et al are evidence against #1 and #4. They are clear evidence that yes, before the 20th century, serious people were trying to understand how the social world worked, and they were actually thinking rather than avoiding topics that might challenge self-deception.
What I really hate here is the idea that past generations were just all suffering “self-deception” compared to us enlightened moderns. IMHO, a lot of people have forgotten that the very idea that we could be “self-deceived” and that we might benefit from experimental evidence stems largely from the work of Decartes and other pre-20th century philosophers who created the foundation of modern science. People such as Smith and Marx should not be lumped into the Dark Ages of self deception next to the medieval Aristotleans.
What is the strongest evidence that ‘counting things’ in today’s manner is the only or even the best route to insight about our political life?
I’m not saying it isn’t, but it’s not self-evident to me that ‘counting things’ no matter how honestly and conscientiously done yields better political insights than you can get from reading, say, Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle — who directly observed but did not count in the modern manner.
Robin,
Well, let’s take account of your pals in ICES there at GMU, the “ES” of which stands for “Economic Science.” So, if one takes a really hard nosed view and says that science requires the possibility of controlled expermentation, then it is not until the 1940s when Chamberlin did his first experiments at Harvard, thereby inspiring his student (and your colleague) Vernon Smith to become the “father of experimental economics,” which deigns to call itself “economic science.” So, there is a Number 9 (or whatever).
OTOH, there is also the question of self-identification. Hume and Smith did not think of themselves as scientists, but as moral philosophers. Heck, that is what Smith was a Professor of. I think the first to start calling themselves “social scientists” were the positivists of the early 19th century in France, most likely Auguste Comte, much reviled by Hayek, although I am far from certain that he did not have predecessors, possibly even Saint-Simon, whom Hayek reviled even more as the father of “fatal conceit” (of the possibility of rational centrally planned social engineering). One who certainly proclaimed himself to be a scientist was Marx, although we now think that he somewhat overdid his claim.
It was probably only late in the 19th century that economists in the English language tradition began to use such terminology. I do not know if Marshall did or not, although he clearly viewed economics as being akin to both biology and physics. Right at the turn of the century, John Neville Keynes gave us the distinction between “positive” and “normative” economics, which certainly is an effort to establish a scientific methodology for the discipline. It might be interesting to discover who in English actually first used the term “social science” (or scientist), especially in regard to themselves.
I agree with Robin’s choice of #4 as the overriding factor. Self-deception, and the delusional thinking it engenders, challenges the classical assumption of rational behavior (which also bolsters the Austrian School’s emphasis on revealed preferences). Twain talked of three kinds of untruths: lies, damn lies, and statistics. Sad to know that if facts get in the way of one’s comfortable paradigm, simply creating new ‘facts’ can bolster any viewpoint. Ultimately though, self-deception and its sister sophistry are sheer folly – just as hubris comes before the fall. I see the other #s as subsets of #4 – the largest explanation for the human condition (and why von Mises and the like are not THE economists studied in standard economics for that matter).
I’ve had to go look up again what I read in “Against the God” … did John Graunt (1620-74) do counting?
Since economics is the science of human interaction, I think the basis for the question is false. Economics has been studied for quite some time. Mises showed many years ago the futility of attempting to equate economics with the other “hard” sciences. I believe he was right.
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There are certainly a lot of details like that to take into consideration. That is a great point to bring up. I offer the thoughts above as general inspiration but clearly there are questions like the one you bring up where the most important thing will be working in honest good faith.
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