Tyler Cowen on Masonomics

In #2, "cultural economics" is the missing piece. On politics being about the relative status of different groups, I would say that Robin and I developed this together. On #6, I would say a key point is that if you are agnostic on a question, or set of questions, at the research level, your personal political behavior should be equally agnostic. In any case, thanks for the coverage!

I find Masonomics a perpetually fascinating subject, especially since I read so many GMU econbloggers avidly. Thanks for this very interesting post.

"3. Markets always fail..."

...to do what? That's what I always want market failure proponents to answer. What do you think markets are supposed to do? Only then can we determine if they fail or not.

According to Austrian theory, the market is a process and doesn't have any goals or purpose. Only people have purpose. The market is a process that enables people to achieve their goals, their purposes. Of course, Tyler is an Austrian, so clearly he thinks the market is an entity in itself existing outside of humanity with its own purpose and goals. I would like to know what those are.

I would like to modify my statement above. If markets have a purpose at all, it is to implement property rights. Property rights are abstract unless people are free to dispose of their property as they wish. Free markets instantiate property rights. I can see no other purpose for them.

In the matter of policy analysis, I think a distinction needs to be made between policies that the major cultural and ideological "teams" have already affiliated with and those that they have not.

The former case is your 50.02% vs 49.98% case -- people don't want to let down "their team" over something as silly as its being factually wrong in a policy matter. As Tyler's #4 points out, that's just how politics and policy work.

But on issues so new that the teams haven't yet affiliated with one side or the other, there is a real opportunity to make a difference. I would point to the internet as a perfect example here -- it was on the stage before anyone could decide whether it was affiliated with "team red" or "team blue" and so decisions and analyses made early on (prior to 1995 or so, say) really made a difference.

To put it another way, the single point at which path-dependency is greatest is the moment before the teams pick sides on a given issue. All policy analysis before that point is potentially important. Essentially all policy analysis after that point is useless.

Is this "cultural thickening" supposed to emphasize an ongoing process? The way I'm understanding it, I'd think "cultural thickness" would make more sense. Or is "thicken" being used as a transitive verb here -- that culture "thickens" institutions?

to your point, fundamentalist;

3. Markets fail...

1. ...to enable you to achieve your preferred inner state.

and of course your inner states are not stable and your preferences change after the fact. ("i want inner state A. i achieve inner state A. oh, but, wait, really i wanted inner state B. therefore, someone or something must be to blame for my undesired inner state.)

1. Is item 6 a 'Create Your Own Economy' plug? And it completes a circle back to item 1 on individual signalling and self-deception.

2. Tyler's views on the purpose of politics make me question why he is now starting really to engage on health care on MR. Should his speech yesterday lead me to a cynical conclusion?

another bob, that sounds more like religion than markets. Religion and philosophy deal in inner states; markets deal in goods and services.

But with the exception on Hanson and your recent paper, is masonomics producing any papers?

The ideas are interesting but I would like to see more meat on the bones.

Publish or Perish!

At one point you floated the idea of a Masonomics book.

Is that happening?

So, where does Masonomics go from here?

The most obvious low-hanging fruit is to begin to incorporate within economics a 100-year-old field of study with a much stronger track record of predictive power about many major issues of today than economics itself: IQ research.

At present, most economists are as ignorant as a box of rocks about IQ. George Mason recently hired one IQ-savvy economist, Garett Jones. If you hired more, and brought in psychometricians and the like from outside economics, you could really have something within a decade that would make George Mason stand out.

But, do you have the courage?

Arnold -

As a GMU student interested in Masonomics, I'm interested in what you would consider the most important foundational works for Masonomics are. A canon of sorts, I guess. It seems like there should be one, but there isn't, and oftentimes it feels like "Masonomics is whatever Bryan/Robin/Tyler/etc. are working on at the moment." Obviously the criteria you set out here are less vague, but there doesn't seem to be a clear trajectory to where Masonomics is headed to me.

I think that Tyler's pyramid would fit well with Doug North, who in turn would credit Hayek.

Although somewhat later than Hayek, Maslow and McGregor and the general systems theory crowd embraced this view in psychology and organizational theory in the 1950s and 1960s.

Rather than "cultural relativism" or "cultural thickening" perhaps just saying that there is a culture factor (or vector) in research and policy analysis that cannot be ignored. How can you measure the "thickness" of culture or talk about it for that matter? Such a term seems frought with imprecision. You may be able to take into account a certain direction, tendency caused by a cultural norm that skews outcomes in a consistent way. You might also be able to show how these cultural factors can be changed over time and take this temporal element into account in analyzing potential changing outcomes over time.