In Some Economists Say the President of Harvard Talks Just Like Them, Virginia Postrel explains that “the habits of mind that made [Summers] a successful researcher — including the style and rhetoric that economists use when they talk to each other — help explain why he is now embroiled in controversy as president of Harvard”:
In lambasting his nonjudgmental, empirical approach to the question, opponents are not merely challenging Dr. Summers’s brash manner or his evaluation of the data. They are attacking the very method economists use to address social policy questions. And, not surprisingly, some of his most outspoken supporters are fellow economists.
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Dispassionate hypothesis testing is particularly important for practical questions, because different explanations may imply different solutions. Take Dr. Summers’s argument that the primary barrier to women in science, as in other high-powered jobs, is that employers demand single-minded dedication to work. “They expect a large number of hours in the office, they expect a flexibility of schedules to respond to contingency, they expect a continuity of effort through the life cycle, and they expect — and this is harder to measure — but they expect that the mind is always working on the problems that are in the job, even when the job is not taking place.”Married women, he argued, especially those with children, are far less likely than married men to put up with such demands.
For universities, this suggests the tenure clock for junior professors may hurt women who have young children in the same years they are expected to “publish or perish.”
Virginia Postrel uses the extra space provided by her own site to expand on how non-economists don’t understand how economists speak:
People with an emotional stake and without the disciplinary habits of separating “is” from “ought” get pissed. But there’s more to the story.Take Summers’s use of the word “marginal,” a concept so central to modern economics that economists can hardly think without it. Even as a journalist who tries hard to avoid jargon, I know from personal experience that if you slip and say “marginal” rather than “additional” or “incremental” — the economic meaning — people will think you mean “unimportant,” “wasteful,” “worthless,” or just plain bad. If misunderstandings can happen in a speech on the economic importance of aesthetics as the absolutely critical “marginal value” that determines whether a good or service succeeds, imagine what happens when you’re talking about affirmative action.