An interesting review of Piketty’s new book, fairly extensive and highlighting something I’ve noted too, the new opening, that Piketty (but not only Piketty) represents, of economics scholarship to equal exchanges with other fields: 

In Capital in the 21st Century, Piketty explained how he had felt drawn to return home from a star-studded US department, because economists in the US were intellectually insular, while in Paris they would mingle with anthropologists, sociologists and others. And on this front, Capital and Ideology goes much further, most of it reading, as I put it to Piketty, more like a history of the world than an economics book.

He doesn’t disagree: “it’s somewhere at the frontier between history and economics,” although such boundaries are “not as sharp as some economists like to pretend.” He regards himself as an all-purpose social scientist, but “if I really had to pick a field [now], it would probably be more history than economics,” because “it’s only by taking an historical perspective on economic issues that we can reopen the economic debate.” Too many economists only bother to look “at the last 10 years, and that tends to bias their views in a conservative direction,” because “they forget about the diversity of the solutions that were used in the past, sometimes with great success.” Take public finance, he says. If EU leaders knew more about the bumper wealth taxes that rapidly cleared Germany’s huge post-war debts, they might not have meted out such savage retrenchment on the Greek people during the euro crisis.

Piketty sees some signs of a new economics emerging, though he still sees lively young minds being so hemmed in by the “obsession” with “trying to look very scientific” through mathematical techniques, that they “are no longer interested in the big picture and human societies” that originally inspired them. But Cambridge’s Diane Coyle, who has just published Markets, States and People, is more upbeat, and is happy to give Piketty some of the credit for the new vibrancy of her field: “It is very apt and interesting what he’s done over the two books: to use the question of inequality to revive interest in political economy,” and pursue a “healthy convergence” between empirical economics and political science.“

…

[In recent years,] economics as a whole is getting more interesting. A generation ago, we saw Nobels handed out to Ronald Coase, Gary Becker and Robert Lucas in short order, for theories that respectively proposed deepening property rights to fix social problems, using rational economic man to make sense of love, learning and family life, and modelling the whole of the economy on the assumption that everyone was rational all of the time. Back then, the only interest economics had in sociology, anthropology and social psychology was to displace them.

In the last few months, by contrast, we’ve seen Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo awarded the Nobel for open-minded experiments about what interventions can alleviate poverty in developing societies, another Nobel laureate, Angus Deaton, co-authoring a book about the life-shortening ways in which American capitalism gets under the skin, and the former Bank of England governor, Mervyn King, co-authoring another on the havoc played with the discipline’s old assumptions when it faces up to how little it truly knows about the likelihood of future events. Economists no longer look at neighbouring disciplines as ripe for imperial conquest, but instead are finally interested in learning from them. This is for many reasons, including the financial crisis and the arrival of big data, but Piketty has helped in pointing the way.”

The idea of a collaborative social science, when that incorporates many different methodologies and try to respect them all, is it enormously appealing.  Right after World War II, it looked as though it would be a battle between sociology and political science; then, starting in the 1970s I guess, economics and rational choice theory really began to take control. Perhaps it is true that now we are moving into a more polythetic way of inquiring into our world. I think that would be a good thing.