My friend Ignota was gearing up to teach a course on law as it affects the dispossessed. She put together a formidable coursebook, with lots of snippets from ecnomists. I teased her about how the economists were taking over the world.
"No, no," she said, "it is the world that is taking over them."
I hadn't thought of it that way before, but I think that she is onto something. I remembered out conversation this week when I read Castles, Battles & Bombs, billed as teaching us "How Economics Explains Military HIstory." It's a rewarding read, full of thought-provoking insights on the place of the military in a world of limited resources. But I don't think it is the book the authors thought they were writing. In particular, I'm not sure it is really about "economics.
Take what may be the most readable chapter: an account of intelligence and counter-intelligence in the Virginia campaigns of the civil war. It's great fun, bringing together a wonderful bunch of illustrative insights, several of which I'd never heard before. The authors present it under the rubric of "asymmetric information," which certainly gives it an "economic" flavor. But there is nothing in here that is any different in kind from what you find in John Keegan's excellent Intelligence in War or, I suspect any other standard discussion of military intelligence.
Similarly, a chapter on the strategic bombing of Germany bears the label of "Diminishing Marginal Returns." I get the drift: the question is whether the bombing was worth the effort, and whether more bombing was worth more effort. It's another rewarding read, including (ironically?) a lot of seemingly sophisticated discussion of military-strategy issues that don't seem "economic" in any recognizaable sense at all. The nominal topic--was bombing worth it?--is important, but it has been addressed at agonizing length elsewhere and I doubt that the authors can claim to have added much that is new.
Perhaps a more explicitly "economic" account emerges in the chapter on the condottieri who made so much of a nuisance of themselves on the Italian peninsula in the Renaissance. Here the authors do seem to have found a useful organizing theme. And perhaps an economist is specially sensitive to recognizing or understanding a world without strong government, mostly governed by deals. But there really isn't much of anything by way of special insight in their analysis of individual contracts.
Maybe the most telling of all is their account of the Force de Frappe--the French struggle to make itself a nuclear power. Once again, it is a worthwhile read: an informed narrative of the politics of the French nuclear initiative and its long, slow demise. But if ever there was a political figure who did not fit well into an economic model, it would be Charles De Gaulle, the very prototype of a cultural nationalist. As any good economist would have to recognize, there really is no economic reason for an independent France, separate from Germany and half a dozen smaller countries on the European landmass. The reasons are rooted in language and related cultural characteristics that go back into the mists of time and remain virtually invulnerable to economic analysis. The authors come close to conceding as much: about the only thing "economic" they can think to say about the Force de Frappe was that it cost money, and France had to make choices. Not a lot for such an effort.
I suppose it is a bit heavy to lay so much blame on the authors of this book, for all they are doing is following an impulse that appears to be prevalent among economists today. Was it not Gary Becker, truly an elder of the tribe, who declared that economics now should be regarded as not just a science of commodities, but rather a general inquiry into human behavior.
Well, maybe. In a way, I can't blame them. Economists have to find something to win them degrees and professional advancement. And as Merton Miller (I think) said in this context: all the low-hanging fruit has been picked. So we are left with the task of (a) attaching queer or unexpected interpretations to familiar human events; (b) tirelessly searching the data for odd ounter-examples; or (c) claiming the turf for an economics that risks becoming content free.
So maybe Ignota was right. Or maybe we have what Piaget saw when he considered the relationship of psychology and mathematics: that someday, psychology will indeed merge with mathematics--but neither mathematics nor psychology will look the same after that happens.
--Jurgen Brauer & Hubert Van Tuyll, Castles, Battles & Bombs (2008)
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