Well, I thought we were seeing the end of the world as we know it when I wrote my last post, but it is now clear that things are steadily getting worse, and it is hard to see how the economic crisis can have a short-term happy ending. I suspect (though who can tell right now?) that we (in this country and abroad) are in for some serious and structural changes. It may be that all of those undergraduates being trained in economics will be able to straighten things out. I would be happy if they could, but at the moment the collective wisdom of the economics community seems woefully inadequate. One way to understand this financial crisis would be to say that it represents the failure of expertise. I think that would be right, though of course the toxic combination of faux-expertise and political opportunism is the immediate cause of our financial difficulties.
It won’t happen, but it would be useful for the academic community to ask if science has failed us, especially since in recent years the scientific claims for economics have been loud and institutionally triumphant. There must be some reason why universities pay economists higher salaries than almost anyone else, right? But which of the recent winners of the Nobel prize in economics has stepped forward with usable knowledge over the past few weeks?
At the moment, economics seems more dismal than scientific, and most of the other social sciences are not doing much better. The universities will soon be asked to provide expert opinion on practical approaches solutions to the Big Problem that now confronts our society. We will, I hope, have useful and well-informed suggestions, for this is how our universities have historically attempted to put knowledge in the service of society. But my fear is that the current reward structure of higher education, with its single-minded emphasis on highly focused research results, has significantly weakened our capacity to respond to social crisis. I hope I am wrong.
My credentials as a commentator on international credit markets are suspect, but my issue today is not what we cannot do to solve the international financial crisis. It is not even whether social science has lost its sense of social mission. It is what we, qua educators, might do with and for our students in the short term. We are all experiencing an existential crisis, whether we are contemplating retirement, thinking about how to maintain our mortgages or hoping to embark on a career. Is this not a teaching opportunity for us? It seems to me crucial that colleges and universities think of ways to engage faculty and students in discussion, teaching, and short-term research on the causes and effects of the financial crisis. I think we are at the beginning of a very large and quite general social crisis. If so, the least we can do is to make sure that faculty and students are thoughtfully engaging with it.
