Barbara Bergmann (emeritus professor at American University) suggests we need to reorient economic empiricism. Here's the beginning of her column on the subject:
"The New York Times has reported a discovery by biologists studying how bottlenose dolphins hunt fish in groups. They found that individual dolphins consistently took specialized roles: one particular dolphin always served as herder, and the others served as barriers to the fishes’ escape. The scientists discovered this by watching two groups of dolphins during 120 feeding sessions.Probably a slight overstatement in that last sentence, but the comparison of biology and economics is still quite stark. To a large extent it's a stark difference for good reasons. We have much better data available than biologists that don't specialize in the particular species of highly evolved primate that interests us. Why go for a small sample field study when there's plenty of work to be done on the ACS?
Those two dolphin groups probably received more close attention in this single study than any of the human groups known as business establishments had received from professional economists in the last 200 years."
But clearly there are questions better answered going out in the field, and economics departments don't really prepare you at all to do that work.
One of the things I like a lot about the Urban Institute is that they combine field work with data work. A lot of the field work is headed up by public policy or sociology PhDs, but the economists actually participate in it too. It's a model that more economists should follow.
Field work has costs too, of course. As we know from work with datasets, it's very hard to parse out the truth in observational data. The methods we've developed to do that often require careful model design and lots of sample size. That's just not there in field data. But the point is not to just do one or the other - the point is to rely on the strengths of each approach. Moreover, economists that are trained to worry about model identification are exactly who you want to have working on field studies because they know the pit-falls (and vice versa - you want people trained to do field studies looking over the modeling).
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"We have much better data available than biologists that don't specialize in the particular species of highly evolved primate that interests us. Why go for a small sample field study when there's plenty of work to be done on the ACS?
ReplyDelete"But clearly there are questions better answered going out in the field, and economics departments don't really prepare you at all to do that work."
Maybe not. But sociologists and psychologists and others already do such field work. :)
A lot of psychologists have a similar problem, but in a different direction -- we rely really far too much on true experiments done in a lab on college students (due to their strong support for causal claims) and too little on field experiments, quasi-experiments in the field, or observational/ethnographic behavior of real research. Even much of the field research done in psychology is cross-sectional and uses survey data, simply because the costs and challenges associated with quasi-experiments and observational research are overwhelming for the resources we have.
ReplyDeleteI typically think this is just one of many arguments for interdisciplinary work -- we need more teams of economists, sociologists, psychologists, and why not, anthropologists and others, to work together to tackle the big questions of human behavior. I think some really cool stuff comes out of that.
Dolphin feeding is still a promising research area for a graduate student like you, Dan. No one has yet written down the dolphin's utility function, described the dolphin's dynamic choice problem, numerically solved the value function to get the policy function, and then used a representative dolphin to match aggregate fish feeding moments and back out the utility function parameters. A paper like that would probably have a shot at a top field journal, maybe Aquatic Economics Review.
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