Rethinking the Dismal Science
academic disciplines are much
like cartography, defining established
boundaries and pressing the limits
of knowledge into new domains.
But could you trust the assumptions
and methodologies of a discipline
that, like an atlas drawn before the
discovery of the Americas, leaves
out half the picture? Although many
women working in economics wonder
exactly that about their own discipline,
Feminist Economics, an academic
Rethinking the Dismal Science
by Christopher Dow
journal housed at Rice, is helping “This professor presented his “Contemporary mainstream
bring change. For the past nine views as the objective conclusions economics is dominated to an
years, the journal has been surveying of scientific, detached research,” astonishing degree by one analytic
economic regions formerly considered Strassmann says, “but he clearly had framework that traces its roots to the
terra incognita and, in the process, a personal stake in assigning family philosophical work of Adam Smith
is encouraging reassessment of gender roles. I began to see that maybe in the 18th century,” Strassmann
incomplete maps of our economic I couldn’t trust the knowledge of the says. “Neoclassical economic theory
world. discipline to be as free from personal assumes that relations among people
Diana Strassmann, the editor of experience as I had been led to believe are governed by self-interest. The
Feminist Economics, began seriously it was.” central character of economics is
questioning the problematic nature of the autonomous ‘economic man.’
mainstream economic theory while a Standard theory presents this person
first-year graduate student at Harvard The Dismal science as having wishes and needs along
University. As she listened to one of with a set of resources. Faced with
her professors argue forcefully that a Although economics is descriptively choices, each with an attached price,
married woman should remain at home termed a social science, Thomas he dispassionately considers the
with her children, she suspected that Carlyle dryly referred to it as the various possibilities for satisfaction
he simply was unenlightened about the “dismal science,” and a London and carefully weighs their costs against
possibility of equitable gender roles in Times writer once decreed that old- their relative degrees of potential
the family. Later, though, she learned line macroeconomics was really satisfaction.”
something interesting about him: He “macho-economics.” The founding To explain and predict the
was married to a woman with a Ph.D. fathers of economics—and they behavior of economic man, mainstream
in economics who stayed at home with were exclusively men—built the field economists have developed
their young children. on what they believed to be rigid, mathematical models that present
empirical objectivity, and since then, equations with mathematically
the discipline has valued “science” expressed definitions, assumptions,
over “social.” and theoretical developments clearly
laid out. Strassmann laughingly relates
that a standing joke in the profession
is that economists have “physics envy”
and sometimes try to compensate by
using complex math even when the
point is obvious. “Students learn that
no model is perfect,” she says, “but
they also learn that it is bad manners to
excessively question the simplified
Winter ’04 25
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