CROSSING THE LINE

Abstract

It seems appropriate on this occasion to honor both Gary Becker and James Coleman by conveying a little of the flavor of the interdisciplinary workshop they jointly ran at the University of Chicago on Rational Choice Models in the Social Sciences. This seminar has been remarkable and unique. It gained a following in many quarters all over the world, but perhaps is not so well known in the general economics community as it might be. I've encountered many people who have expressed great pride in the fact that they presented a paper before that group and survived to tell the tale. The coverage of fields was immense - psychology, biology, genetics, game theory, anthropology, law and political theory, public choice, economic history and, from time to time, sociology and economics. The speakers came from all over the country, not infrequently including visitors from abroad, and were carefully selected by Gary or Jim. Surely there hasn't been a social science seminar of this range and scope in a research university in my professional lifetime, and it has been a great privilege for me to participate in it. The fact is that there are scarcely any people left these days who could pull off such an endeavor, and now that Jim is gone, there has been a 50% drop-off in that talent pool since last year. Progress in any intellectual discipline invariably circles in on itself. Specialized languages get developed and the people who learn to speak them discuss a common set of problems. They tend to look at them from a similar point of view and share many untested, if not untestable beliefs. Much is gained in this. In spite of its solitary and competitive aspects, scholarly activity is in the end a cooperative activity and these commonalities - one is tempted to say norms on this particular occasion - allow participants in the community to communicate and trade ideas more efficiently. On the other side, it marks off some fairly arbitrary boundary lines and establishes certain intellectual property rights that make communication between groups difficult, if not downright hostile and counterproductive. Perhaps this is why most of us largely ignore other fields. It also helps, when you cannot solve certain aspects of a problem, to take solace in the fact that it really lies in the domain of another field. These natural intellectual barriers built from specialization is what made the interdisciplinary Becker/Coleman workshop, as most called it, so unusual. I think the reason it has been so successful is in focusing on a specific language - rational models have much in common wherever they are applied. Along the way, participants were exposed to a fair bit of substantive field knowledge. Of course having already read the relevant literature was helpful. It just wasn't necessary. Participants could engage meaningfully in the give and take of the seminar if they either knew or were willing to learn some of the language of rational choice. Regular attendance among the social scientists at the university was concentrated on a small, unrepresentative sample for that reason, but it cut across most of the social science disciplines and the professional schools. James Coleman, who somehow managed to do many lifetimes' worth of work in only one, took a serious intellectual interest in economics fairly late in his game. He came into closer contact with economists as they became increasingly attracted to his work, Becker no doubt being the most influential. And as sociology fell on hard times and many people lost the faith, he started casting around for a better anchor for his thinking, coming to feel that the style of economics was the best that could be done under the circumstances. Jim's flexibility about methods and ideology made it possible for him to acquire much of the economist's outlook. While by no means fanatical, he came to be a staunch defender of the view that it was generally fruitful for social science to maintain that people behave rationally. …