I was reading this post by economist Rajiv Sethi, which began, “The celebrated economist Robert Solow has died at the age of 99,” and continued:
Solow is best known for his model of growth which is simple in the best sense . . . With over 42,000 citations, Solow’s paper on growth is among the most influential in economics. Much of the subsequent literature has built on his foundations . . . While Solow’s influence on the profession through his writings was profound, his influence through the students he advised was even greater. Take a look at his academic family tree, and you will see an extraordinary collection of economists . . . Some of his former students were themselves incredibly fertile (in generating economists), so Solow has an extraordinary collection of academic grandchildren. . . . Scholars have influence through their work, which can be tracked and traced through a thicket of citations. But they also have influence through their interpersonal guidance, which remains largely invisible and unheralded. Solow’s influence through both channels was staggering and profound. . . .
This is fine. I like to write obituaries too, and these are the places to write nice things (for example here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).
With regard to Solow, though, I was moved to reply:
I met Solow once and wasn’t impressed; see here.
But maybe he was having a bad day.
The larger problem I see is the habit of economists describing other economists in heroic terms. I guess econ takes this from math and physics. I remember as a math and physics student how we were supposed to worship Archimedes, Newton, Euler, etc. I’m sure they all deserved this, but it seems to have transferred into academics in certain fields making idols of their predecessors and even of their colleagues.
In poli sci I don’t see this ancestor-worship being so strong. Locke and Hobbes are intellectual heroes, sure (I’m not talking about their personal characteristics here), but modern political scientists don’t seem to be idolizing the political scientists of the mid and late twentieth century.
As to statistics: as students, we were taught that Fisher or Neyman were intellectual heroes, and I do think that has caused some problems. We should be able to celebrate great work without idealizing the individuals involved. They’re just people!
Rajiv responded:
Economists can be quite brutal and dismissive towards each other also, see for example Romer in the post you linked to! Solow himself was very critical of Lucas. For me there are relatively few real heroes, and Solow would not be among them. But his list of academic descendants is unmatched in terms of status and influence.
To which I replied:
I agree that economists can be negative about each other (for example, Krugman on Hayek and Galbraith). In that, they’re different from mathematicians and physicists, who wrote about their predecessors with worship or else didn’t bother writing about them at all. I can’t recall any mathematicians saying, “Cauchy wasn’t all that.”
Some more examples from economics are the extravagant and, in my impression, unreasonable adulation given to Gary Becker and Lawrence Summers. I’m sure these guys were impressive, but I don’t think the whole thing of treating them as geniuses worked out so well.
In a dark room with many of the lights covered up by opaque dollar bills, even a weak and intermittent beam can appear brilliant, if you look right at it.
I wonder if part of the problem is that economics has traditionally been taught as a history of great men as much as a history of ideas. When I took economics in high school we read a book called The Worldly Philosophers, which was all about how Adam Smith was so great, and David Ricardo was so great, and Keynes was so great . . . it’s no surprise that later economists wanted to add their personal heroes to the pantheon.
In contrast, in statistics, yes, we hear about Gauss and Laplace and Galton and Pearson and Neyman and Fisher, but it seems much more closely tied to the content. Gauss has the normal distribution, Laplace has probability theory, Galton has correlation and regression, etc. This continues to modern figures such as Rubin with causal inference, Wahba with splines, and Efron with bootstrap. The great contributors are known by name, and sometimes by epoynyn (“Gaussian distribution,” “Bayesian inference,” etc.), but still it seems ultimately more about the ideas than about the genius of their promulgators.
For some reason, things have gone differently in psychology. Great names such as Freud, Piaget, and Skinner get reassessed, and modern leaders in the field are respected for what they have not done, not so much for who they are. On the rare occasions that a psychologist attempts to puff himself up into a Great Man, he becomes more of a figure of derision than anything else.
Perhaps I missed it, but was any female mentioned? If not, why not? And, what does it tell us about such ancestor worship?
Paul:
Yes, Grace Wahba, mentioned in the above post, is female. More generally, though, yeah, the history of most fields of academia is predominantly white guys.
“Gauss has the normal distribution, Laplace has probability theory, Galton has correlation and regression….”
…Adam Smith outlined the principles for the well being of all humanity…(shrug)
This is not about ancestor worship in general but just Robert Solow. I am very unimpressed with his growth theory model, which, while logical, has immense measurement issues — disabling, I think. (The “capital controversy”, which was rather confused IMO, was just one aspect of it.) Then I encountered his version of what economists call efficiency wage theory, in part a microfoundation of macro element, while I was doing my dissertation. HIs version was based on a rather conspicuous error in reasoning which I had to fix in order to make progress. So I was predisposed not to have a very positive view of him.
But I later met him in a sitting around situation, talked a bit about efficiency wages and their relation to promotion ladders, and he seemed to take it all in without any ego at all. I thought, this is the kind of guy you’d want for your advisor. And then I saw him on a widely attended panel on the use of survey methods for valuing externalities. During the Q&A a woman from the audience asked a reasonable question but garbled the jargon a bit. Ken Arrow, who was also on the panel, came down on her like a ref issuing a red card, but then Solow intervened, translated the question into proper economese and said it was worth considering. He got lots of points in my book.
So, while I wouldn’t worship him, I respect him as a mensch, which isn’t all that common among big name econs.
Solow’s growth model has had great practical and policy influence in that it argues that savings can increase physical capital accumulation which can increase long term prosperity. It struck me when learning it that the model functions less as a predictive model of reality and more of a quantitative demonstration of how that process “could” occur, how that argument “could” be true. These types of models are useful in that they separate arguments that *could* be true from arguments that *couldn’t* be true, but it feels like with the drive to be data driven, people are circumscribing these models in that way less and less over time.
To me the most interesting thing about the Solow model is not that greater savings lead to greater growth, but that the process is self-limiting: eventually the capital stock gets so large that all savings are absorbed by the need to replace depreciated capital. This means that persistent growth can only come from technological progress, and pushed people to thing more deeply about the determinants of innovation. Solow was critical of some of this literature for very good reasons discussed in my post. But not all of it, he had a good sense of the right direction to take.
I had a brief discussion about the Solow post with one of his students, Glenn Loury, on the latter’s podcast though the episode as a whole had little to do with this):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEeA2yduFtw&t=2564s
I don’t usually comment. But Solow was on my committee. He was very helpful and probably understood better than anyone else on the committee what I was trying to do. He was the only member of my committee to find an error in one of my equations.
I am glad that I got his guidance and advice.
Chuck
Andrew: of your initial interaction with Solow, you write
“As for Solow, I only saw him once, in a talk at MIT 30 years ago where he anti-impressed me by making an offhand swipe at how he would cut funding for Amtrak—I guess he thought all those highways were just free.”
this is a surprising anecdote. robert solow was one of the most pro-big government economists, and was a vicious critic of ronald reagan. for example, in the 1980s he wrote “I would like to see the President stop this nonsense about how ‘I will never raise taxes over my dead body.’” and “We’re going to be a number of years digging ourselves out of a hole that we dug for ourselves over the past six or seven years.”
amtrak builds railways (not highways), and rail is notoriously inefficient in the united states. the US has one of the highest costs per mile of any country in the world (between 50% and 250% higher), and all the countries that spend more build most of their rail below-ground, while in the US it is mostly above-ground. projects also take much longer. amtrak trains are also slower than in other countries (on some routes, buses are faster).
my more charitable interpretation of your memory, in light of what we know about solow’s economic and political views, is that he was critical of the inefficiency of amtrak and US rail in general. if its efficiency were similar to that of countries such as france or germany, the US could enjoy more rail at a lower or equal total cost
Sam:
The context was that he told us he was a liberal, and then he mentioned the Amtrak thing as an example of how he was not always following the party line. I didn’t think he was making the case that Amtrak was poorly run and needed some fiscal discipline; rather, I got the impression that he was making a generic economist’s anti-subsidy argument, and the fact that he did not mention subsidies for other forms of transportation gave me the sense that he hadn’t thought it through. Kind of like the way, back in the day, academic economists would looove talking about how they hated rent control but they wouldn’t often bring up the mortgage tax deduction. The Amtrak thing was just an off-the-cuff remark; it just annoyed me because it gave me the impression that he was just saying things without thinking them through. Had he gone on a generic anti-Reagan rant, that probably would’ve annoyed me too. I think he was taking it as given that he was politically very liberal and he was just trying to pick a conservative position to take.
In any case, it was just one brief interaction, so don’t take too much from it. As you say, maybe I just misinterpreted Solow’s remark. And, even if not, everyone can have a bad day.
“the fact that he did not mention subsidies for other forms of transportation gave me the sense that he hadn’t thought it through.”
Andrew: passenger rail only covers part of the trip. For the rest of the trip you still need roads. Putting an unnecssary train in the middle of the trip is about the least cost effective possibility for transportation imaginable. The roads have to be there anyway. How you gonna get your piano home from the train station? On your bike?
Your use of the word “subsidy” for roads is misleading. Roads pay back their cost many times over with the economic activity they generate. In fact it’s the economic activty roads generate that is so hated by environmentalists and frequenlty claimed as a reason **NOT** to build roads: Unlike your beloved bumbling Amtrak, roads fill up too quick. Remember? That’s why your analysis of traffic demand went off the highway. You failed to account for the fact that the roads are already at peak capacity. Or as the dude from the University of Washington who studies traffic claims all the time “we can’t build our way out of it” (e.g., traffic).
And that’s aside from the fact that demoquacks like the High School Gym Teacher Senate Pro-Tem are incessantly piling on safety features of near zero benefit. Great deal!! Makes roads look more expensive than they are, showers cash on democrat-supporting contractors, sounds politically wonderful “protecting your safety [by 0.008% more per $10M]”. WCGW? :)
Passneger rail was abandoned because it *doesn’t pay the cost of operation*, much less the cost of maintenance and equipment. BNSF, UP, CSX, CNI, CP and NSC all pay for all their maintenance and development. All of them have added substantial doubletrack capability in the last few decades, maintained tunnels, added hot box dectors and are working on PTC. Now you want to steal it for Amtrak and then claim Amtrak is “efficient” :) Man, you are a democrat!
Hilarious. Amtrak is so efficient that, even with subsidized construction it couldn’t afford to remove the 30mph corner on its “high speed” line between Seattle and Portland – much less find and engineer that could remember to slow down to navigate that ONE SINGLE CORNER – that caused the wreck on the inaugural run! What a clown show.
Chipmunk:
I admit I have not studied the numbers myself. From what I’ve read about the topic, just about all forms of transportation, ground, sea, and air, get lots of government subsidies, and I think a lot of it comes from the sort of economic analysis that you suggest, that the subsidies are a public good generating economic activity. If the government suddenly stopped subsidizing road, rail, and air travel, I guess there’d be lots of bad economic consequences. Whether the levels of subsidies should be increased or decreased, I don’t know. I think that economic analysis should go into the process, even though ultimately this is a political decision of resource allocation.
Regarding Amtrak in particular, I don’t think it transports many pianos! My impression is that the economic rationale is to provide some redundancy in the transportation system, reduce the load on the highways and airports, etc.
Regarding Solow, maybe I’m being unfair to him based on an off-the-cuff remark he made. My impression at the time was that he was not really speaking as an economist; rather, he was saying that he was a political liberal and then he was picking this issue to show that he was not a party-line doctrinaire liberal. But, to me, it sounded more like he was recycling some talking point he’d heard, and I didn’t get the impression that he’d thought through his Amtrak recommendation. If he’s said something more like what you wrote above, I might’ve disagreed with him on the policy but at least I would’ve had the impression he’d thought about the problem a bit.
“Passenger rail…how are you going to get your piano home?”
Lol
I would probably agree with Solow here. If the government is going to fund rail transport, it should be nationalized, not this zombie publicly funded for-profit nonsense. Or else, defund and privatize in the Japanese style
“… and rail is notoriously inefficient in the united states. ..”
Passenger rail. The US rail system is optimized for freight.
Andrew:
while i will doggedly persist in my optimistic belief that Solow had thought through his views on transportation policy, i appreciate the added context :-)
Marx almost certainly has a class of worshippers across the social sciences & humanities. Would Kissinger count? On one hand he was fairly infamous by the time he died, but on the other hand he was still invited to give talks and write essays despite his infamy. If you count Machine Learning/AI academics as statisticians there seems to be some ancestor worship forming in that field. Though perhaps they get it from the Computer Science side of the family (e.g. Linus Torvalds, Guido van Rossum, etc.)
Political Science seems like it’s in a weird spot. All the limelight gets soaked up by a mix of politicians (e.g. Churchill, Lee Kuan Yew), philosophers (e.g. Rawls, Nozick), economists (e.g. Hayek, Friedman, Keynes), and journalists/lawyers/activists. Actually the more I think about it the stranger it seems that there really aren’t many “famous” modern political scientists (maybe Fukuyama is the best modern example?)
Blackthorne:
The only famous political scientists I can think of in recent decades are Francis “End of History” Fukuyama, Samuel “Clash of Civilizations” Huntington, and Robert “Bowling Alone” Putnam. But, yeah, they’re not so famous as all that; also, none of them is worshipped. Their ideas get respect (and some debate), but nobody’s going around telling stories about how Fukuyama is such a genius, the way they go around telling stories about Lawrence Summers or whatever. I think part of it is the econ Nobel prize. I’m sure there are a lot of political scientists who deserve a Nobel prize, but I’m also sure that if they gave out three of them every year like they do with econ, they’d also give out a bunch of them to some dim bulbs. The point is that, if almost all the Nobel prizewinners are retrospectively considered to be brilliant, then that makes the others look brilliant too. Economists X and Y won the Nobel prize, economist Z is as smart as X and Y, therefore he’s a genius. Hey, they almost gave a Nobel prize to Bruno “published the same mediocre paper in 5 different journals” Frey!
One thing that statistics has going for it in terms of not worshipping some of the founders of the discipline is that it’s fairly widely known now that Galton and Pearson were massive eugenicists. This is, obviously, somewhat different to the views we have today. It’s probably done a fairly good job at divorcing the individual from their contribution and suggesting that a critical lens on the assumptions and motivations of the individual can lead to a more nuanced interpretation.
> Galton and Pearson were massive eugenicists. This is, obviously, somewhat different to the views we have today.
This is probably highly misleading, perhaps unintentionally on your part. Which specific view of eugenics-related view Galton’s (or Pearson’s) do you think “we” would disagree with today?
Spanish science philosopher Gustavo Bueno argued that scientists are “operators” that organize artifacts with their hands: they manipulate symbols on pieces of paper, Excel sheets, lab equipment, etc. so as to produce a “result”. In some sciences and cases, one consequence of this manipulation is that the influence of the “author” gets cancelled out (as you can cancel out a term in (x^2 -1) / (x – 1)), and it does not matter who performed the operations. But often scientific results carry an “original sin”.
The OPERA faster-than-light neutrino anomaly illustrates the point. When that lab announced they had measured neutrinos moving faster than light, the statement should have been read as “OPERA claims neutrinos can move faster than light” rather than “neutrinos can travel faster than light”. The fact that OPERA was an integral part of the “discovery” was underlined by the fact that the measurements contained an error because of a loose cable within OPERA.
(Replication can be seen as a procedure to “cancel out” the original author contribution in a published result).
So, in many disciplines you do not posit “X” but something like “Dr. Y says X”. Many posts in this blog boil down to denounce how “Dr. Y says X” does not imply “X”, often because Dr. Y was a fraudster.
Therefore, in some disciplines all Dr. Y’s find it convenient (or necessary!) to build a brand around their name. A brand in the style of Apple (meaning: if I buy Apple, I expect no fiber cables to be loose). Therefore, what the entry describes is exactly what you should expect.
Its hard to have a purely descriptive philosophy of science since what gets called science has changed over time.
Eg, it started like “take no ones word for it”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullius_in_verba
This is bizarro to the modern “trust the science” mantra, and reflected in how results are communicated/assesed/etc.
For the loose cable, the root problem was really lack of training in logic rather than the cable.
You can only test Theory T plus auxilliary assumptions A by deducing the consequences P and comparing to observation O. Then say P disagrees with O:
T and A -> P
P != O -> !(T or A) = !T or !A
Nominally functioning equipment is one ubiquitous auxilliary assumption. It is always there, lurking in the background, preventing us from disproving any theory.
We can deal with this via independent replicatiion. Whats the chance some aspect of [complicated apparatus] malfunctions vs multiple different [complicated apparatus] malfunctioning in the exact same way (eg, a specific loose cable)?
So why would anyone be trusting OPERA to not have a glitch? And why would it be shameful for them to publish said results, glitch or no? In fact we should assume *some kind* of glitch by default.
The shame is on those substituting trust for science, which turns it into something quite different from the practice in the early days of the royal society.
As I remember it OPERA basically published something like “we keep getting faster than light neutrinos and we can’t find the bug in our setup can anyone help?”
Most of those people didn’t think FTL was the right answer if I understand and remember correctly, they just didn’t know how to account for or find the problem.
OPERA’s behavior appears fine. Still people were forced to resign over it.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.10371
These kind of glitches are probably common when using complicated cutting-edge tools, but only get investigated when yielding unexpected results.
Mathematicians (especially pure) are harder to criticise because they make statements which can be logically proven, so the ones who make mistakes are not published and get forgotten and the descendants build on a solid foundation.
This isn’t the case in other fields (especially social science) where the theories are about very complex processes and built on very vague approximations of noisy data and easy to pick at. Because there is much less consensus, I can agree with someone on one thing and disagree on another.
It is also more common for people to have a opinion on economics that is a core part of their political and personal outlook than mathematical ones. Ie if someone demonstrated that all those proofs of root 2’s irrationality were somehow wrong then I would say “huh, that’s weird” and move on with my day. If someone showed me conclusive proof that my views on free markets vs nationalisation were completely wrong then I would have to do a lot of soul searching and adjusting other positions which are built on that.
> It is also more common for people to have a opinion on economics that is a core part of their political and personal outlook than mathematical ones. Ie if someone demonstrated that all those proofs of root 2’s irrationality were somehow wrong then I would say “huh, that’s weird” and move on with my day.
I believe I understand your point, but if it somehow came to be that we had no correct proof of the irrationality of sqrt{2}, then I think that would be Earth-shattering.