Contrasted Faults Through All Their Manners Reign

By modern standards, Oliver Goldsmith’s 18th century poem “The Traveler—Or, a Prospect of Society” is political incorrect four times over: it is not gender neutral; it has at least one sentence that seems racist, it includes a noncondemning mention of slave-holding as a sign of wealth; and it offends national pride in its treatment of various nations. Nevertheless, it has some profound passages. Let me repurpose the following passage as a criticism of our discipline of economics:

Though poor, luxurious; though submissive, vain,

Though grave, yet trifling; zealous, yet untrue;

The first contrast, “Though poor, luxurious” fits least well. But it can apply to many economists—or indeed to any workaholic—if one thinks of “poor” as referring to a life that is not full and rich in nonfinancial ways, while “luxurious” refers to what one has bought.

The second contrast, “though submissive, vain” strikes a more powerful chord. Many economists are are vain about the how many papers they have published in which journals, but submissive to implicit, sometimes arbitrary, rules about what topics one should pursue, what methods one should use, and what things one should say in a paper. They have made themselves unreflective cogs in a machine that sometimes does the right thing and sometimes goes awry.

The third contrast “Though grave, yet trifling” is apt for the seriousness with which many economists approve of and attack dimensions of research that are orthogonal to how much potential the research has for improving the human condition, providing deeper insight into how the world works, or enabling other economists to do their work better.

Being grave in this sense is often connected to the zeal of the fourth contrast: “zealous, yet untrue.” For me, “zealous” points to those who are taught dogmas that they internalize and try to enforce on the rest of the discipline throughout the rest of their careers. “Untrue” points to any willingness to misrepresent one’s results for the sake of either one’s career advancement or to advance an ideology or dogma one adheres to.

All papers should be thought of as teaching documents, and teaching often requires some oversimplification before all the complications are added. But there are ways of doing this that show that one cares about the truth and ways of doing this that show how little one cares about truth.

Here’s to less poverty, less luxuriousness, less submissiveness, less vanity, less of being grave, less of trifling, less zeal and less untruth!