A few years ago I co-founded the Politics, Philosophy and Economics society at La Trobe University. There were very material reasons to establish the club, such as access to funds, power over the PPE degree and the ability to attract interesting speakers – yet there was a cultural agenda as well.
We would learn about international trade in economics, and then be privy to an echo chamber in international relations tutorials, as politics students disregarded and disparaged the contributions we had learnt only weeks before in international economics. Then a week later we would be presented with an economic model that assumes human decision making was uninfluenced by morality and watch students, and even lecturers, all too comfortable with speaking about it as the final word on the topic.
Facilitating interdisciplinary dialogue was one of our main goals. We thought it ludicrous that particular economic models, limited by mechanical assumptions, were often portrayed in textbooks and amongst some economists as the final word on a matter.
Comparative advantage is a valuable insight that government should take into account when directing investments, but isn’t the only consideration. The idea that the influence of the industry on the health or the politics of the country should be considered was quite foreign in economics classes.
To us, it was obvious that questions of human behaviour were best addressed in an interdisciplinary manner, using a variety of methodologies. But how could a group of PPE students solve this lack of interdisciplinary engagement?
Perhaps we could achieve this by making some basic engagement with philosophy more commonplace for people undertaking study which leads to public policy. Another approach was simply to speak to students about how intellectual engagement with other disciplines could provide a better framework, for thinking about the questions that they were oh-so-sure their two years or so of economics or political science gave them a unique capacity to answer.
Now I’m at Melbourne University, which as I’m constantly being told, is the best university in Australia. For all the differences in culture and attire (thank god!) the same lazy disregard for the value of listening to other disciplines seems prevalent. Listening to a senior criminology lecturer that specialises in white collar crime, as she disregards and disparages the discipline of economics in the space of business regulation should be on everyone’s bucket list. I’m quite confident that if you speak to anyone who has been in the PPE Society for any length of time you will hear similar horror stories.
The damage inflicted by this arrogant tribal culture is also evident in the low value some people put in their own disciplines. Unjustly, there are people from a number of disciplines that have been made to feel, as they have surely been told, they have no place in the world of public policy. I recently spoke to a women doing her PhD in anthropology. Upon asking what she was working on, she told me she was studying chronically ill patients. Specifically, the effects that self-narratives have on their recovery. She then followed with the same question to me .I told her, which at the time was evaluating the efficiency of different funding models for hospitals. She then said, meekly, “oh, so something more practical.”
It’s astonishing because just a few days prior I was reading up on the disproportional financial burden that specifically chronically ill patients put on hospitals. If there are low cost methods and practices that could improve recovery times for these patients, such as doctors encouraging them to change the way they think about their injury, it seems to me a certainty that hospital managers would love to know. Whilst my analysis was a necessary part of making policy in the area, her analysis can almost be used for policymaking as soon as the results are in.
The tendency to ignore expertise in public policy making is well documented by now, and it’s hardly just the inexperienced students at the PPE society that have been talking about this. Peter Shergold, the former Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, has also weighed in:
“One of the most important ways in which natural tendencies to failure can be avoided is by making sure that public policy is informed by the experience of those who have to implement it; those who work at the counters, in call centres and directly with communities,” he said in a 2004 report.
I could give you more examples, from the failure of nutrition programs in Bangladesh* to the failure of radiologists to take into account the skills of sheep farmers, but I think by now you get the point.
So how do we fix such a problem you might ask?
I don’t know, maybe ranting will help.
* First few pages of “Evidence based public policy: a practical guide to doing it better”. by professor nancy carthweight
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