THE USEFULNESS OF POSITIVE ECONOMICS. The cross-disciplinary conversation appears to be degenerating into a brawl. Jane Galt has provoked Henry Farrell and Kieran Healy (Isn't there a song about "getting his Irish up"?) Both posts offer ample cross-references and will reward careful study, as well as material for further discussion. For tonight, a couple of basic observations. Professor Healy has some qualms about testable implications as being sufficient or necessary to claim academic, let alone scientific, standing. Professor Farrell claims that there are is no scientific validity to partial-equilibrium models. I beg to differ. Is it not the case that sellers offer more stuff if they see higher prices, that buyers buy more stuff if they see lower prices, and prices adjust to balance offers with wishes? Are there any fundamental parables (I too have read and understood McCloskey) of political science, sociology, the other social and behavioral sciences, let alone cultural studies or literary theory, that can be laid out with such clarity?

There is much more that I intend to say about modelling, particulary in its general-equilibrium and game-theory incarnations, but not tonight. Tonight is for modelling of another kind.

The dearth of testable implications, let alone teachable moments elsewhere in the academy contributes much to the low estate in which many observers hold it. Consider this Den Beste dig at the current rulers of the academy: "They had to try to persuade other citizens to their point of view (opposing the war, opposing nationalism as such and America in particular, opposing capitalism and globalization, and all the other opposings we've come to know and love about the academic left's political activism). It means that their ideas, previously developed and spread largely in hermetic isolation, were necessarily subjected at long last to empirical test, and didn't pass that test.

"And they failed miserably. It's hardly surprising; after 20 years of intellectual masturbation they didn't produce any babies. Their ideas were revealed as being empty. What they mostly reaped was ridicule. Their proposals didn't pass the horselaugh test." Lest the academic readers of this post be tempted to let the observations of a non-specialist pass, consider this Peter N. Stearns essay (on the free side of the Chronicle of Higher Education, via Political Theory) about the future of "cultural studies." "The point about evidence can be more troubling. Generalizations about people's behavior in capitalism, for example, have often seemed little more than assertion, with no real inquiry into actual data about motivations. The same holds for some of the most sweeping statements about prisonlike conditions in various modern institutions. References to social class or gender, in the hands of some cultural researchers, may turn out to derive from one or two popular novels or behavioral prescriptions, with no effort to trace resonance or even to amass a significant number of cultural sources. Unpacking the meaning in a single provocative item has sometimes counted for more than proving claims about context or impact.

"Implications of relativism, inherent in the cultural approach to some degree, have often been presented too baldly or defiantly, distracting from solid findings. Few disciplines have really been converted to a sense that everything is in the eye of the beholder, and grandiose claims in that direction have, rightly or wrongly, alienated many potential allies. And some culturalists have taken such a delight in exploring particular subcultures, for example where sexuality is concerned, that larger cultural standards have been underinvestigated or even ignored. A colleague recently pointed out to me a graduate student who was amazingly knowledgeable about cultural evidence for the values of various sexual minorities, but who knew nothing about either widely current standards or about actual sexual behaviors in the society he was studying.

"For a variety of reasons, thus, it has been too easy for nonconverts to dismiss the cultural turn as radical self-indulgence." Professor Stearns proposes that the way out of that impasse is more of the same. I suggest, to the contrary, that a relatively simple notion, institutions evolve to reduce transaction costs, will provide much more understanding of the evolution of cooperation in general, including culture, than continued interest in the transgressive and the bizarre.

As a footnote, The Angry Economist emerges as a possible source of Company Mail.