Take It Inside

The full length title of this post would have been: Take it Inside: the Value of Liberal Arts, Or why sloppy history is a bad idea, but thats obnoxiously long and this isn't a funny and charming autobiography.

I got into an argument yesterday in class. It centered around my deep objection as a history person to some very biased and sloppy history by one Martin Wolf in Why Globalization Works.

I have many problems with doing history badly and I'm sure I'll get a chance to go into that rant another time in the near future. But for now I'll give Wolf the benefit of the doubt and assume that he isn't intentionally doing bad history. Maybe this catastrophe is the result of unrecognized perspective bias and trying to do far to much in far to little space. Both of these factors probably play a role. But I suspect a deeper more insidious and common problem- a serious liberal arts deficiency.

I go to a liberal arts school. I like the concept of liberal arts. Though the rhetoric sometimes gets a bit pompous I agree with the value of well-roundedness. There seems to me to be far to little cross-pollination between disciplines, especially in the humanities and social sciences. This would not necessarily be a problem if economists did not so often try to be historians, or even more disastrously historians try to be economists, and worst of all politicians try to be everything else.

Each of these particular disciplines (which are mine and so of course the ones I am biassed towards) has its own wisdom and with all the overlap it amazes me that people rarely take the time to look at and respect other methods of doing things.

This summer I was reading a historian who countering years of one dimensional analysis made the shocking and innovative suggestion to analyze events in both an individual and institutional framework. The literature on the topic considered this approach revolutionary, but I can only laugh. In one of my first days of politics 100 the professor taught a method of analysis, which we regularly used, in which we look at phenomena in light of 4 Is- Individuals, Institutions, Ideas, and Interests. So maybe it wasn't so revolutionary after all. If there was a little more conversation maybe we wouldn't have to make the same discoveries in methodology over and over again.

If economists took a little time to learn about the horror that the word inevitable and single cause explanations evoke in historians their work could be significantly less propaganda sounding- and it would only require a few qualifiers and a word replacement search.