Excellent! (4.00 / 3)

And, I can attest that it's a conversation I've had with any number of professors of economics (from assistant to full) when you can sit 'em in their office (or, over a beer) and you've moved beyond the "publish or perish" preliminaries.

You'd think with that much recognition/awareness, they could move beyond their more hidebound premises - which they'd tell you really don't hold up as well as they'd like on their best day with the data.

Someone elsewhere got off on a tear about flagship institutions in higher education, and how lower tier institutions and departments chase after them.  My own experience suggests that those flagship institutions are often determined with a "thumb on the scale."  And, dollars for research tend to follow.  As if there is much for "outside" (rfp) dollars for research in economics anyway.

Add to that stew, my experience suggests, that it is the younger - or, more newly minted and hired - of the econ professoriate who have the energy and enthusiasm to pursue these kinds of avenues - if all of that hasn't been wrung out of them by their final oral defense.  The secure among them (read: full professors) are often using lecture notes developed two decades earlier, and have published little in the previous one.  And, if the more secure prove to be too much of a burr under the saddle of the Department Chair (or, University President, in one case that I know of) they can find themselves with their request for a sabbatical denied, or the least desirable class section assignments.

Discipline has many meanings in academia.

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by: bystander @ Sat Jun 12, 2010 at 21:51:43 PM CDT

Discipline isn't synonymous with bondage (4.00 / 4)

Odd, that in attempting to take from the earth what we think we need from it, we've developed social institutions which are far more rigid than we are, and that now, after millennia of adding to their power, and to the precision with which that power can be applied to the hapless animate as well as inanimate objects around us, we find ourselves equally hapless -- trapped inside the very leviathan that we thought we'd created to do our bidding. Odder still that we were aware almost from the beginning that this was where we were headed. How old is the Tower of Babel story anyway?

What all of the Best and the Brightest, the Grown-ups, the Serious People, etc. always fail to grasp is the narrowness of their conception of control. My guess is that this arose from the fact that mechanical systems were so much easier to manage than organic ones, and that their effects were so much easier to perceive. Everyone understands what a sword, or a plowshare, or a Hoover Dam can do for us. Very few of us have ever been able to see untli after the fact what they can do to us.

We aren't facing a test of our power; what we're facing is a test of our understanding. The test itself isn't a new one, but thanks to what we're pleased to call progress, it may be the first one which we can't resolve by refusing to see it for what it is.

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by: William Timberman @ Sat Jun 12, 2010 at 22:44:51 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

Hanson (4.00 / 2)

Jon Hanson taught my torts and corporations classes in law school, as well as a seminar on critical legal theory.  He is not only a brilliant, innovative, and progressive thinker, but a genuinely nice and down-to-earth person, which is unbelievably rare for a law professor at the top law schools. Some of his ideas, and the social psychology research they draw upon, challenge our most cherished assumptions about human nature in disturbing ways, even for those on the left. But its well worth it, and his ideas have definitely changed the way I look at the world.  

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by: the new @ Sat Jun 12, 2010 at 23:18:15 PM CDT