The humanities are good. Do not @ me.
Last night, I had a bewildering exchange on Twitter. My interlocutor was Bloomberg View economics writer Noah Smith. He eventually deleted the post, but he had said, in so many words, “Economists have a lot to learn from other disciplines. I doubt those disciplines will be in the humanities.” Immediately, his mentions filled with doctorate-holding economists asking, wait dude what? A popular question was, do you mean history?
And there were others, such as myself, who snarked. I started an extended exchange with this question:
I don’t think it’s being unfair to Smith to say he then proceeded to explain that he doesn’t really know what “humanities” denotes. He had already accepted from several others that, if history was among the humanities, he’d have to allow that as a caveat. Others besides myself pointed to philosophy. Matt Bruenig chimed in to say that Amartya Sen, economist and winner of a minor Scandinavian government award in the field, was among the fans of the philosophical study of economics. Smith didn’t really fend off any of these counterpoints. To his credit, he didn’t even try. There was no way to do so.
Smith didn’t exactly say he was thinking exclusively of people using “humanistic” jargon, maybe borrowed from thinkers who are suspiciously French, to talk about safe spaces or whatever online. However, he did concede to me that he was rooting his complaints in what he’d seen of the humanities on “Twitter and blogs and in conversations.” Fair enough. If I judged “economics” based on what I saw in those forums, I’d probably think of it as a bizarre death cult bent on rationalizing children going hungry. But I’m told there are some good thinkers in the field if you actually turn to the academic literature.
In any case, there’s no way to mount an argument about the value of humanities to economics without thinking and talking like someone trained in the humanities. You have to do humanities to really argue against humanities. That’s not just because the “humanities” encompasses the systematic study of morality, ethics, and theories of politics; it’s also because economics grows out of what we’ve now cordoned off as humanistic thought. To take just one example, Adam Smith is widely considered both the progenitor of modern economics and a political and moral philosopher. If you tried to tell him he had more in common with Megan McArdle than John Locke, he’d probably slap you silly.
(You also, by the way, absolutely don’t need any formal academic training to win an argument with Megan McArdle. I’m not arguing on behalf of credentials or institutions, but ways of thinking.)
Am I wrong about any of this? Cool, I might be. I’m not a historian of economics, or an expert on the boundaries between academic disciplines. I’d bet you’d have a hard time explaining why I’m wrong without citing historians and Smith himself, at which point… are you doing STEM? Is that what STEM is?
The deeper issue here is that no one who understands power or even education is really “against the humanities,” as a mode of thought (rather than a profession). That’s not just because a lot of the really good users of power have in fact read their Locke and Rousseau. It’s because some people do seemingly hold a much different belief. They appear to believe we should have fewer people who have the skills of “humanists” and can do things like mount coherent arguments about value and power.
Does anyone who writes computer code for a living really want everyone to focus exclusively on “learning to code,” any more than every player in the NBA hopes everyone morphs into Lebron James? I doubt it. I’m sure most of them mean well when they say it, but in any case, having credentials as a coder doesn’t mean you can’t learn, formally or informally, from what we call the humanities.
And even if we do accept that a humanities degree is “less useful” on the job market than a statistics degree, what we’re talking about is instrumentalizing a formal qualification and the skills it connotes, not the usefulness of other forms of learning. How exactly might the humanities be useful to someone who already has employable technical skills?
Let’s think about those economists in Noah Smith’s initial tweet, the ones who need help and want to learn. What kind of person could help them out? If you really want people who understand what forms of inquiry and knowledge might be useful to “economists” — defined, extremely charitably, as a field of people using particular methods to try their best to figure out how the world works and how we might improve it— you want people who are trained to think like what we call humanists, even if their degree says they majored in online posts. Otherwise, they’ll have a hard time posing moral, ethical, or political questions. Their inability to do so might help get them a job as a pundit, but it will also likely impinge upon the usefulness of whatever charts and graphs they create.
On the other hand, if you want gullible political subjects who don’t understand power or what it does to them, mistake self-help grifters for philosophers, and believe in 19th-century phrenological horseshit despite having gotten a well-paid tech job…
Well OK, at that point, I guess you’d want to discourage the plebs from reading their Foucault and their Arendt. Just make sure you take away their Adam Smith, too.
