Recently profiled in the Wall Street Journal as “the intellectual standard-bearer for the Austrian school of economics,” Peter Boettke teaches at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and conducts research there and at the Mercatus Center in Arlington, across the river from Washington, D.C.
Boettke was one of the organizers of a tribute to Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan on September 9, which featured presentations by two other Nobel laureates, Amartya Sen and Elinor Ostrom, as well as encomia from GMU’s former law school dean, Henry Manne, and the current chairman of the university’s economics department, Daniel Houser, among others.
After the ceremony, Boettke spoke with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about his thoughts on the “next big thing” in economics: What is it, he was asked, that non-economists know little about today but everyone will be talking about in five or ten years?
Two of Boettke’s colleagues, Garett Jones and Margaret Polski, also answered the same question that day.
‘Nature of democracy’
Boettke singled out the work of Ostrom and Buchanan, particularly their ideas “about the nature of democracy and citizenry,” that democracy is more than just voting but more active participation, and exploring the preconditions for that.
Elinor Ostrom’s husband, Vincent Ostrom, Boettke said, “wrote a wonderful book called The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerability of Democracies. It’s a very densely written book, so it doesn’t have the sort of popular sway that it should,” but it establishes the way to think about “those conditions about what it means to be a citizen, or what they call an artisan-citizen.”
Following on the work of the Ostroms and Buchanan, he continued, “We’re now examining those things: how it is that you create or cultivate (educationally) individuals [so they] can become self-governing citizens or their own participants within the democratic process.”
That idea, Boettke said, “is going to get more and more explored,” and Ostrom’s Nobel Prize and other events mean that it is “going to capture the imagination of a lot of scholars [in] what Amartya Sen [calls] the ‘public reason project.'”
Looking at another discipline, Boettke noted, “if you read in philosophy, a lot of people in philosophy now are calling for an idea of ‘public reason.’ I think that idea is something that no one knows about now, but ten years from now, people will all know about it and think back, ‘When the hell did they get started thinking about that?’”
Interdisciplinary Economics
One of the developments that excites Boettke is the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of economic research and theory.
“There’s a rising trend of programs in philosophy, politics, and economics,” he said, and that is a return to “what actually took place back at the end of the nineteenth century.”
Boettke explained:
“You can think about modern economics as an hourglass shape. You start with really broad questions and then, as we believed that the role of the economist was to be a technical expert, the questions narrowed, but then we found out we knew more and more about less and less.”
Consequently, he said, “we had to open the questions up again. We opened them up to sociology, to psychology, to philosophy, to politics, so as a result the hourglass goes narrow and then widens up, and we’re at that point of the widening up.”
Boettke pointed out that “the financial crisis is a perfect example of this, because you can’t just answer it as a technician in economics. It’s a question about the legal and political rules, the culture of Wall Street.”
Citing Karen Ho’s book, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street, which he called “fascinating,” Boettke explained that “economists normally don’t look at those things, but now we have to. What are the implicit rules that are going on? What do these people believe that they are doing?”
Animated and smiling, Boettke returned to his hourglass analogy and concluded: “We started out, we got very narrow, we didn’t go anywhere -- or it didn’t really help – [and] now we’re opening up again.”
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