Harvard Thinks Big

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

Harvard Thinks Big was billed as an "important" event. Its Facebook page was ebullient. Expectations were high. "A dream team of 10 Harvard professors will each talk for 10 minutes about the 1 thing they're most passionate about...Inspired by TED Talks (Ted.com) and motivated by what makes Harvard great -- amazing professors, cutting-edge research, and breakthrough ideas..."

But somehow this doesn't go far enough. As I walked out of Sanders Theater tonight I thought: Harvard Thinks Big could change this university.



At 8:00pm fourteen hundred students were in line to attend the event. The first speaker, Daniel Gilbert, said that if gay sex was causing global warming "we'd be on the streets in a riot." Our brains are wired to care about sex and food. (Matthew Kaiser then rejoined, to begin the second presentation, "I'll just say: gay sex does cause global warming...But only if you do it right.") At one point, David Malan told us that a phone book four billion pages long could be ripped in half only 32 times. To end the night, Tim McCarthy called America a "protest nation."

The event was, in every way, exciting and Harvardian. The theater was buzzing and warm. As I sat there I thought (as I often do, but rarely as much as tonight) how lucky I am to go to a school where such an event could happen -- could be organized, could be executed, and could be attended, so well.

But at its core the event was subversive. It forced us to confront assumptions we make about the nature of knowledge itself. What makes an idea "big"? Must it compel us, be useful to us, must it matter? Who determines that? The existing practitioners in the discipline or the world? And who should listen? And why? What, Harvard Thinks Big ultimately asks us to grapple with, is the purpose of public discourse in our age and what does Harvard, the university, have to do with it?

Consider the way ideas change and add to other ideas. When Steven Pinker, a psychologist, presented on the decline of world violence over time, one thinks of an earlier presentation, Kaiser's "Killing the Boy," on the metaphorical violence embedded in our social notion of boyhood (the boy's value, he says, derives from his death). Growth Violence. These themes linked to Maria Tartar's discussion of childrens' literature, the Little Red Riding Hood, the child seductress, the fallen pray. Red Riding Hood comments, in an ironic way, on Andrew Berry's discussion of population genetics (growth, seduction, death); and "Killing the Boy" on Glenda Carpio's declamation on hip hop art (outsiders, violence, boyhood). When Tim McCarthy, the final speaker, called America a nation "obsessed with tomorrows" one thought back to Daniel Gilbert, the first speaker, who explained that our brains are physiologically unable to prepare for our tomorrows.

Violence. Sex. Growth. Hope. These are themes that no one department is equipped to handle alone. Harvard Thinks Big gave us the opportunity to experience knowledge in the round.

More than just a fun night, Harvard Thinks Big was a glimpse at what the university could be -- big ideas released from the confines of their disciplines, the biologist's big ideas mixed with the historian's, the lit professor's with the pyschologist's, theirs with ours, Harvard's big ideas with the world's. Louis Menand in his new book, The Marketplace of Ideas, argues that the academy has professionalized the production of knowledge and has turned each discipline into a system dedicated to its own perpetuation, a "self-governing and largely closed community of practitioners who have an almost absolute power to determine the standards for entry, promotion, and dismissal in their fields."

Harvard Thinks Big is an indication of what an alternative might be.

Weighing in: The Asian Ceiling

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

Check out Jon Yip's post, "The Asian Ceiling" for a review of a Kara Miller's Boston Globe editorial about Asian discrimination in the college admission process. Asians are the new Jews, Miller explains:

In a country built on individual liberty and promise, that feels deeply unfair. If a teenager spends much time studying, excels at an instrument or sport, and garners wonderful teacher recommendations, should he be punished for being part of a high-achieving group? Are his accomplishments diminished by the fact that people he has never met – but who look somewhat like him – also work hard?

Now, Ms. Miller clearly has lots of opinions about what a "fair world" would look like, and what education is supposed to be all about. (Remember, this is the woman who wrote the Boston Globe editorial a few months ago called "My Lazy American Students.") She and I could probably quibble all day long about the "justicial," Kantian categorical importance of things like high GPAs, SATs and nice recommendation letters -- my view, for the record, is that these things are pretty non-predictive of the sort of achievement a just society should be promoting, things like creativity, critical thought and democratic experimentalism. And furthermore, GPAs and SATs are highly determined by sociological factors, like culture, affluence, familial support and, yes, ethnicity, which are distributed unfairly. A world where SATs and high GPAs matter less is not a world I'm prepared to protest against (or write Boston Globe articles about).

Yet that argument would be a big waste of time. Ms. Miller seems to think that certain achievements should "entitle" a person to admission, that people "deserve" or "earn" admission. In reality, the opposite is closer to the truth. As Louis Menand has argued, certain admission "spots" (think of them as needs that the university wants to fulfill) create, as it were, the applicant's opportunity to fill them. There are no Platonic, unchanging qualifications for a spot at Harvard. Instead, as new needs come about, new spots open up, old ones close down, and an opportunity for admission shifts, erratically, from one student to the next. One year ivy league school X identifies a felt need for a flute player with a certain background and with certain aptitudes. The next year it doesn't. The real question is how fairness can even be said to apply in such a convoluted, unpredictable process.

One Summit at a Time

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

Leiter gives us an overview of Obama's "bipartisan summit" strategy and asks, in effect, will it work? Some smart people whom I respect say that this is capitulation and error (see Yglesias' "doomed strategy" post). That viewpoint conforms nicely with the basic stance on the left since Scott Brown's election, which has been that either (a) healthcare reform is dead on the floor, or (b) RAHM EMANUEL HAS TO GO BREAK SOME GODDAMN HEADS!!! Those are our choices: procedural hardball or effective defeat. Obama is demurring from both. Here's my theory about why.

Congress is a broken. As Lawrence Lessig has said, it's lost its sense of shame. Max Baucus, head of healthcare reform in the senate, can take 3.3 million dollars from healthcare industries without anyone blinking an eye. The Republicans can make unprecedented procedural moves to paralyze the functioning of government, like filibustering every single bill on the floor. Just this week Richard Shelby, Republican senator from Alabama, put a "hold" on every single one of President Obama's outstanding appointees -- shutting down, effectively, the confirmation process -- in order to fast-track earmark process for his own state (he wants an airbase built). This is either farce or high level tragedy. The place is corrupted at the most basic level. It's caught in a sort of drifting institutional nihilism that threatens to ruin this country.

Americans, I believe, feel this. They're angry and confused. If you follow politics you'd know that it's the Republicans specifically, more than anyone, who have exploited the pathologies of the system to their own political advantage. But if you don't follow politics, if you're more interested in long term problems, in the cost of health care coverage, say, or the amount of money your family has to pay for groceries, then you're inclined to see in Washington the money, the partisanship, the obstructionism, and write off the whole damn system. You don't make a distinction between "Republicans in Washington" and "Washington." Health care looks less like a reflection of the problem and more like a part of the problem itself. People hear that Obama is "negotiating behind closed doors" and "cutting deals" with folks like Mary Landrieu and Ben Nelson, and that he's "ramming the bill through the congress" and they wonder, where is all that "change" we heard about?

Cynicism and disillusionment are the moods roiling through our country, threatening to take down everything in their paths, Obama included. The Scott Brown election, in the end, is a ominous reflection of this intense disillusionment with the system itself.

The bipartisan summit thing is Obama's response to this fact. The goal is to shed sunlight on the swamp of the system. It's a chance for Obama to say to the American people, "Look, I'm not part of the problem!" And it's a chance to say to those who are, those deliberately working to cripple the government, "there will be electoral costs, people will be watching." This is transparency at it's best: informing people about the shit their government is doing, about the dynamics of dysfunction, and then giving them the electoral tools to fix it. This is Obama responding to a moment of great cynicism -- Brown's election -- with a bid for empowerment. That's smart politics, and it's very Obama-esque -- the old-school Obama, the one who fought to change the system, the one who fought to engage our country again.

Will this get us healthcare? We'll see.

Photo credit: Flickr stream of JMTimages

The Sociology of Mankiw

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

The notion that economics can explain everything about everything (re: Freakonomics) is something that I’ve always regarded as silly and kinda gross. The basic economic model — the super-rational individual relentlessly seeking out his own material self-interest — is almost embarrassingly inadequate. If you want to deal with something like the Global Financial Crisis then, yes, you do have to start by grappling with the discipline of economics. But that’s not enough. Economics as a discipline fails to paint the picture that sociology, history, science and literature, in concert, can about the world generally. And explaining the Financial Crisis specifically is no different. We need more than economics.

What I’d be interested in reading is something on the sociology of the economics discipline. How did people come to believe the cluster of ideas that that got us into the Financial Crisis? That’s an historical and sociological inquiry. What are the social factors that got a whole group of people to believe fraudulent economics? I like John Cassidy’s New Yorker piece “After the Blowup” (gated, Harvard LexisNexis) because he seems to want to start the process of answering this:

In the course of a few days, I talked to economists from various branches of the subject. The over-all reaction I encountered put me in mind of what happened to cosmology after the astronomer Edwin Hubble, in 1929, discovered that the universe was expanding, and was much larger than scientists had believed. The profession fell into turmoil. Some physicists stuck to the existing theories, which posited a stable universe. Others, Albert Einstein included, tried to adapt the old models to Hubble’s data. Still others attempted to come up with a new account of how the galaxies formed; it was this effort that ultimately produced the theory of the big bang.

There’s a whole corpus of zombieconomics out there — ideas like the Efficient Market Hypothesis and the Great Moderation — that needs to be slayed. But old ideas are hard to kill. And the secret is: killing ideas is a social process, with power struggles and true-believers, as much as it’s an academic process.

Krugman wrote in the New York Times Magazine a few months ago that the problem with the economics discipline is that it “mistook beauty for truth” — i.e., it used neat mathematical models to explain extremely complex and irrational stuff. That’s true, but there’s more to it than that. People value things because people and institution around them value those things. So start looking into peer review boards and tenure committees in the academy. How did one generation, through institutions, protect its own? And start looking at the umbilical connection between mathematical modeling and the financial service sector. Our own Larry Summers made about $100,000 a day doing consulting work for D.E. Shaw. Beautiful math isn’t just attractive — it’s also damn profitable. And in a profession that considers money to be the all-important talisman for predicting of human behavior, do connected and well-paid scholars get more academic attention?

There’s a whole field called the history of science that deals with ideas as social facts, as power struggles and generational battles. Are we going to be seeing a paradigm shift in the field of economics? Who’s going to be leading this shift? And where are they bringing us?

My last question is: should some enterprising students be writing their theses on the sociology of Mankiw?