Sunday, March 12, 2023

Economic Insomnia? A Review of "The Guest Lecture" by Martin Riker.

It’s a rare day when an economist plays the key role in a novel, and even rarer when one of the supporting players is John Maynard Keynes himself.  So, spurred on by enthusiastic reviews, I sailed through Martin Riker’s The Guest Lecture this week, a novel in which a woman, just denied tenure by the all-male economics department at her university, lies awake at night in a hotel room, rehearsing a lecture she’ll be giving the next day while re-evaluating the twists and turns of her life’s trajectory.  Maybe it’s a risk to read insomnia fiction at bedtime, but I definitely enjoyed myself, laughing out loud several times and rereading especially zingy paragraphs.

Yet I was disappointed, and I’ll use this post to explore how and why.  The first part of the disappointment is obvious and straightforward: this is supposed to be an expression of the inner thoughts of an economist, but it shows close to zero understanding of the world of academic economics.  Yes, there is some name-dropping, and yes the great Keynes shows up to guide Abby, the unsleeping economist, through her long night of the Deep CV.  Superficially it’s all there; in substance not.

First, why is Abby an economist?  Where does she fit in that world?  The only explanation we’re given is that she found herself to be “good at math”, and she took a course in experimental economics as an undergrad from a female professor who served as a role model.  Well, OK, that may be part of it, but did she think that being an economist would be a way to change the world for the better, or to understand a complex and puzzling aspect of it, or what?  Other than the paycheck, what did she think she would be getting?  Without that piece, it’s difficult to relate her deep struggles of self-meaning to her career crisis.

Second, so what did she write her dissertation on?  The novel parades scenes from her academic coming of age—her undergrad course with her mentor, following her to grad school, her departure from the expected path of a junior professor when she wrote about about Keynes and the rhetoric of economics a few years in—but there is a blank space in between where the core formation-of-an-economist ought to be.  Grad school in econ is very demanding and, except for a few renegade departments, strongly pushes a market-centered view of the world; how did that go down with Abby?  And a dissertation is the culmination of this process, where the economist-to-be both draws on and finds breathing room from the methodological onslaught to which they’ve been subjected.  This is a very big gap in the record.

Third, while Martin Riker is an academic himself (with a degree in English, no surprise), he misunderstands the tenure expectations for junior faculty to a degree that Abby wouldn’t.  We’re told she was hired by an R1(ish) research university, where it’s considered enough to publish one article a year in second-tier journals.  No way!  Six articles won’t get you tenure unless, just perhaps, most are in top-ranked outlets (AER, QJE, etc.).  Moreover, books don’t count.  Economists regard book-writing as a sort of indulgence, best saved until the choice morsels of science have been parceled out in article form.  The Journal of Economic Literature, the main review outlet in the profession, has steadily reduced the number of books for which it publishes reviews; the latest quarterly issue reviewed just two books.  I’m sure many economists make an entire career in the field without reading a single economics book post grad school.

And, to get tenure at an R1, the candidate’s research has to use formal modeling, either theoretical (as in game theory) or empirical (econometrics).  There is no ambiguity about this.  If Abby spends half her tenure period on a book without a single equation, she should be looking for another job sooner rather than later.  I’m not saying this is justified—quite the contrary—but it’s central to the culture of the discipline.  Making it all seem like an unexpected shock and personal crisis when Abby is denied tenure leaves someone like me wondering whether she had much reality contact all along.

Finally, there just isn’t any economics thinking of any sort in Abby’s nighttime ruminations.  She is steeped in rhetoric, its history and current relationship to philosophy and critical theory, but no thoughts from the economic realm arise to make sense of her predicament.  For instance, she thinks a lot about ideology, but economists for whom this concept matters use it to connect belief systems to social structures and the incentives they produce; they think of ideological beliefs as in the economy, not as forces lying outside it.  On a couple of occasions, in listing the horrors of the modern world, Abby mentions the menace of “endless growth”, a term that has entered the canon of at least part of the left, but rubs nearly all economists, including those on the left end of the spectrum, the wrong way.  Economists inclined to criticize capitalism usually see it as a system that places the gain of the few ahead of the well-being of the many, an important part of which is the repeated demand of the rich for tight money and austerity—not growth.  (The classic statement of this position is by Michael Kalecki in 1943, “Political Aspects of Full Employment”.  This may be the most cited paper by a left wing economist, ever.)  Obviously, anyone who admired Keynes would be reluctant to criticize economic growth in a general way.  Even the word “endless” would annoy economists who think of the world as a tangle of differential equations, not as a rigid arrow forever trending in the same direction.  To be blunt: a mindless reference to the evils of “endless” economic growth, to an economist, simply looks like ignorance.

Even putting aside all those complaints, I didn’t see anything illuminating about Abby’s analysis of Keynes’ essay on the “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”.  Of course, the value of this essay doesn’t depend on whether the people of today, or those of 100 years from now, inhabit a world in which economic necessity has disappeared.  I’ve heard many discussions of it, and none of them have been about its timing.  So what is Abby adding to the mix?  Maybe it’s just me, but I couldn’t find anything new.

Granted, it’s not easy making an economist, much less an economist’s nighttime brain, an engaging subject for fiction.  I’m not saying Riker’s job was easy, only that I wish it had actually given us someone with human depth and complexity who also manages to be an economist.  With few exceptions, novels on academic themes are about literature professors; there’s an obvious reason for that.  I’ve enjoyed them, but I was hoping for something different this time, and not a lit prof who wandered into the economics department by accident.

ps: One more thought occurred to me.  In the book, Abby is concerned that her insight about Keynes and rhetoric was anticipated by Deirdre McCloskey, although she (Abby) came to it independently.  This greatly understates the importance of what McCloskey did.  It is no great insight that Keynes, the author of Essays in Persuasion, was a rhetorician.  Showing that would make no one’s career.  What McCloskey argued, however, is not just that the language of economics follows rhetorical tropes, but that the math does too.  This is an immensely important point.  To establish, apply or simply argue in parallel with it, you have to deconstruct the architecture of modeling in theoretical and empirical economics.  A great example of this is the joint work of McCloskey and Ziliak on statistical significance as rhetoric (and its corresponding scientific shortcomings).  If Abby is on the same plane, she should be writing and talking about the role of “mathiness” in economics, not on the rhetorical status of a narrative essay.  Maybe you need to have actually grappled with mathematical models in order to appreciate what this entails.

10 comments:

  1. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/23/books/martin-riker-guest-lecture.html

    January 23, 2023

    John Maynard Keynes Can’t Save You Now
    Martin Riker’s novel “The Guest Lecture” details a tortured night inside the head of a young economist.
    By Dwight Garner

    Anthony Powell disliked speaking in public, as did Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Larkin and Max Beerbohm. Elizabeth Bishop is said to have been hopeless at the podium. Wittgenstein, on a dais, would begin to stammer. According to Helen Vendler, the poet A.R. Ammons’s stage fright was so severe that he wouldn’t pick up prizes.

    I’ve long sympathized with these writers because I share their affliction. I distrust writers who are too comfortable with a microphone clipped behind an ear. The poet Kay Ryan has written that, at literary conferences, she resents “personality horning in on the real question: the words on the page.” (I love Kay Ryan.) Alas, playing a writer onstage tends to pay better than being one behind a desk.

    Martin Riker’s light, charming and shyly philosophical second novel, “The Guest Lecture,” details a tortured night inside the head of a young academic, an economist named Abigail. She’s sleepless because she’s an insomniac. She’s doubly wired because she must give a talk the next day, one for which she’s woefully underprepared.

    The talk, which is about John Maynard Keynes, doesn’t matter. Abigail was recently denied tenure, an experience that’s dented her sense of herself — she feels like an eagle outed as a mere tern — and thrown her family’s life (she’s the breadwinner) into peril. The house will probably need to be sold. A new, worse town will need to be moved to....

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  2. He does have a “I am short complex.”

    [ An excellent review. Thank you. ]

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  3. https://www.amazon.com/Rhetoric-Economics-Human-Sciences/dp/0299158144

    The Rhetoric of Economics

    Economics needs to admit that it, like other sciences, works with metaphors and stories. Its most mathematical and statistical moments are properly dominated by comparison and narration, that is to say, human persuasion.

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  4. I just got a kindle copy of the book 2 weeks ago, but haven't read it yet.

    But on Keynes: I wrote about the essay in question in a paper on Keynes' "modernism," by which I meant his willingness to use explanations that were not grounded on fundamentals, to take multiple equilibria for given tastes and technology seriously, and to think about the many ways in which means can become ends in themselves -- In the grandchildren essay, I argued, he imagines a kind of putting-paid to modernism in some utopian future where we--we inhabitants of a capitalist economy-- stop accumulating effectively for accumulation's sake (because past accumulation has put an end to scarcity) and start enjoying ourselves with no thought of tomorrow! The essay stands out for me as a sort of wistful betrayal of the modernist insights that otherwise made his work distinctive in a discipline that then and now dealt in Robinsonades (such as characterizing the macroeconomy as a big Crusoe transparently maximizing utility over time).

    On economic growth, though, and this is related to the essay, surely the growth that represents Veblenian arms-races for positional goods can be seen as wasteful. It is related because it is one reason why the idea of the end of scarcity is hard to imagine: postional goods will always be scarce!

    Anyway, very interesting review - thanks!

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  5. I'll be interested to hear what you think, Kevin. You have a particularly good background for assessing this book.

    About Keynes: Guest Lecture portrays Abby's rhetorical analysis of this essay as some sort of major insight. That comes across to me like the sci-fi plot devices where the laws of thermodynamics have a loophole, etc. -- something to keep the story going but betraying the amateurishness of the author. Good sci fi is written by people who know a lot of science.

    I agree the essay itself is a bit out of character. I think he was trying to square a circle, reconciling the economic world of his professional work with the world of sensitivity and cultivation he shared with Bloomsbury. The funny thing is that these very economic possibilities were already available to the upper stratum of British society at the time he wrote. And how did the rich transcend the economic problem? Some buried themselves in financial affairs, others lived indolently, and perhaps a few followed the deeper path envisioned by Keynes. And that's the relevant comparison, in my opinion, because for the foreseeable future the economically liberated life of some will coexist with poverty for many others. OK, off my soapbox.

    And about the "endless growth" line: I've noticed this has become a throwaway epithet when lefties are enumerating the evils of capitalism, sort of like "maximizing short term profits". All the econ people I know, however, wince at it. I've seen Keynes himself blamed for the "cancerous" fixation on "endless growth". If you haven't seen my climate book, I have ten pages devoted to a critique of the degrowthers. Over the top, perhaps, but sometimes you just have to get it off your chest.

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  6. https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/1930/our-grandchildren.htm

    1930

    Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren
    By John Maynard Keynes

    We are suffering just now from a bad attack of economic pessimism. It is common to hear people say that the epoch of enormous economic progress which characterised the nineteenth century is over; that the rapid improvement in the standard of life is now going to slow down – at any rate in Great Britain; that a decline in prosperity is more likely than an improvement in the decade which lies ahead of us....

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  7. McCloskey's "The Rhetoric of Economics" first appeared in 1985. The work is superb.

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  8. This greatly understates the importance of what McCloskey did. It is no great insight that Keynes, the author of Essays in Persuasion, was a rhetorician. Showing that would make no one’s career. What McCloskey argued, however, is not just that the language of economics follows rhetorical tropes, but that the math does too....

    [ This is an important argument, but I am now wondering whether the work of JK Galbraith which I take to be economics can be reduced to or paraphrased by math. Was Galbraith an economist? Paul Krugman among others would argue that Galbraith was no proper economist. ]

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  9. I would welcome further comments on the work of McCloskey.

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  10. What McCloskey argued, however, is not just that the language of economics follows rhetorical tropes, but that the math does too. This is an immensely important point. To establish, apply or simply argue in parallel with it, you have to deconstruct the architecture of modeling in theoretical and empirical economics....

    [ Again, I would welcome discussion of this point that from closely reading McCloskey I would disagree with. I have now read the novel, and am decidedly sympathetic to the author in interpretation.

    Also, I have the credentials and experience to feel my sense is worth arguing. ]

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