Economists Should Not Be In Charge

It's long past normal for economists to pretend that they have the answers for issues in education (and to be wrong pretty much every time). But a post/twitter thread from Cory Doctorow today puts that in the context of larger problems with economism. What is economism?

Most of us believe that we do stuff because we want to be good people, and that other people act the same. But the dominant political philosophy for the last half-century, "economism," views us as slaves to "incentives" and nothing more.

Economism is the philosophy of the neoclassical economists, whose ideology has consumed both the Democrats and Republicans. They dismiss all "non-market" solutions (that is, projects of democratically accountable governments) as failed before they're begun, due to the "incentives" of the individuals in the government.

Doctorow in particular cites an article by Timothy Noah ("May God save us from economists") in tracing the growing influence of economists. In particular they note the growth of things like cost-benefits analyses that involve putting a price on human life. Which is, I learned today, mandatory for all major regulations. IOW, an economist has to sign off on everything in DC.

There's this lovely snippet from the airline biz:

For example, economists convinced Carter to deregulate the airlines and turn legroom into a commodity that you pay extra for. That was the brainchild of then-chair of the Civil Aeronautics Board Alfred E Kahn, an economist, who cheerfully declared "I don't know one plane from another – to me, they are all marginal costs with wings."

Economists find monopolies "efficient." 

Doctorow turns to a 1944 work by Kartl Polyani that has given birth to a view of five areas in which economists mess up. See how many of these you recognize from the education reform ideas of the past couple of decades.

I. Excessive reliance on models, which is a big problem because economists' models largely don't work.

Noah rejects the comparison of economic forecasting to weather forecasting: since 1984, economic forecasting has incorporated 20,000 times more variables with few improvements, over the same period, the time horizon for weather forecasts has grown from a few days to a few weeks ("Hurricanes no longer surprise us. Financial crises still do").

II. Underreliance on data. For all the yammering about data and numbers and models, economists largely ignore actual data. Doctorow cites the classic Ely Devons quote--

"If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"

In education, we've been subjected to talk about the cold hard outputs of deliverables, based on a testing system whose validity is based on unicorn wishes and fairy dust. And, of course, the actual expertise of teachers who swim in education data daily has been dismissed and ignored.

III. A rejection of society.  

At the core of economism is a rejection of the very idea of society ("There is no such thing as society" – M. Thatcher). The only way to understand our lives is to model us as individuals, making individual choices and expressing individual preferences. Economism gives short shrift to how individuals affect one another.

This is, for some, inextricably bound up in the concept of market-based school choice, merit pay, and a few other choice ideas. Schools--both students and faculty--must be understood as atomized individuals, and the fact that unleashing market forces for some would weaken the system that is meant to support all is simply irrelevant. Economism is the principle of "I've got mine, Jack" as a guiding light.

IV. A failure to understand "irrationality."

For economists, anything that is not done in self-interest is irrational. Every problem is addressed from an angle of "what would this person do to get the maximum personal benefit," and anyone who doesn't appear to be acting on that question is irrational. Even if a vast number, even a majority of people, don't follow that guide, they are still considered irrational by the economists, who do not stop to think that maybe observing how people actually behave might be useful.

This "irrationality" could also often be called "ethics" – for example, the decision in various "ultimatum games" to punish selfish people, even if it means getting less for yourself. You can view this as "irrationality" if your sole conception of human motivation is "how do I get more for myself?" But you can equally say, "I don't like people who betray the social contract and I am prepared to go with less if it means punishing them."

But by insisting that ethics are irrational, economism can actually do away with them. Michael Sandel's 2012 book "What Money Can’t Buy," offers examples of things that you shouldn't be subject to market forces, like concierge medical services. A decade later, these have gone from examples of the unthinkable to actual products.

Yeah, we can name a few of those. Like education, where economism insists that if we create "competition," education will get better because people will all pursue their own self-interest. Teachers must be coerced--bribed with merit pay or, more often, threatened with punishment--in order to get them to produce the "product" of education. 

This is the great economism blind spot--there couldn't be any possible reason for teachers to pursue a particular path other than self-interest. In the worst cases, this comes with a darker side--since teachers became teachers despite the fact that teaching is a lousy way to pursue economic self-interest (aka get rich) it must be because their limited abilities put more lucrative paths out of their reach. 

And since ethics aren't really a thing, there should be no issue in setting up incentives for educators to follow unethical paths. But high stakes testing, a very economist approach to running education, incentivizes all manner of unethical behavior, from cutting meaningful education in favor of test prep all the way up to just plain cheating. And the notion that competing for merit pay would make schools function more poorly by stifling cooperation--that's just an unfathomable mystery to economics man.

V. The prejudices of economism.

Well, at least they aren't hypocritical. Doctorow cites findings that economist live like "economic man" by "pursuing self-interest at the expense of cooperation." They give less to charity and are the least racially and gender-diverse of all disciplines. Says Doctorow

It's one thing for a profession to be so different from the majority – but when that profession has elevated itself to the final arbiter of all regulation and government, its narrow composition and ideological blinkers start to tell.

For instance, it is ill-suited to redesign a system that is fully diversified as our population.

Economism has permeated too much of ed reform in the past few decades, not just in assuming that the only rational approach is to pull the levers of self-interest, but in measuring everything based merely on its monetary measure. The notion of "value-added" measurements, as if schools are comparable to assembly lines cranking out toasters. The idea that education's goal is to give students skills whose worth is measured by a future employer's willingness to pay for them. The data-centric notion that students should accumulate competency based badges so that employers can simply pull up a database and search for employees that meet their exact specs. The very idea of "efficiency." The idea that Milton Friedman, the ultimate example of an economist who knows nothing about education but whose vision of education is treated like it was inscribed by a finger of fire on a stone tablet. 

None of these ideas enhance education--at least not if we believe that education is about helping young human beings become their best selves as they learn what it means to be fully human in the world. 

Economism is a sad, cramped, meager view not just of education, but of life itself, and yet in many ways we have let it take over the country. Read Doctorow's piece and the links in it. You may not agree with all of it, but it's definitely worth a think.