Exploring Interdisciplinarity

Lost Cats (courtesy of Liza Rahmat)

Teaching my Network Economy Class last Thursday night, I got an insight into how I might help my grandson Ben, who–although testing off the charts in math–is finding reading a real challenge. That night, we were discussing different approaches to the study of ‘economics,’ and what they might imply for policy making. I made the comparison between the neoclassical–or Walrasian– view, which equates the economy with the market, and conceives of economics as the means of optimizing outputs in the face of scarcity, and Karl Polanyi’s substantive view, which regards the economy as the entire realm of activity in which humans seek to meet their material needs. Whereas the neoclassical definition presumes that there is only one best way to optimize, Polanyi’s broad based definition suggests that there are, so to speak, many ways to skin a cat.

Tactile Art and Learning to Read (courtesy of Ann)

Of course, I thought to myself, so too there are many ways to learn to read!

So too there are many ways to learn to read! 

Certainly, I am not new to reading issues. As my persistent poor spelling attests, I have always had a problem relating sounds to words. In fact, some say I write like I had a New Jersey accent. Fortunately for me, I went to grammar school in the forties, when sight reading was in vogue and Dick, Jane and Baby Sally were all the rage. Memorizing words by sight did not stifle my progress as many educators now claim. Whenever I encountered a word that I did not know, I took my father’s encouraging advice: “just substitute the world wheel barrel and move on,” he said.

Isn

It was not long before I advanced from Dick and Jane to the Nancy Drew series (much to my English teacher’s horror). By the age of 16, I was reading all the classics–Dickens, Austin, the Bronte sisters, etc. My biggest worry was not reading per se, but rather running out of books to read–a concern that continues to plague me, notwithstanding Amazon’s relentless suggestions. 

Years later I discovered that my son Stephen (now a business consultant and PhD) was having problems similar to mine. Particularly troublesome to him were words containing the sounds th and wh. On the other hand, for him, words like just and next were easy to read. Pondering this curiosity, I realized that instead of relating sounds to words, Stephen was relating shapes to words. Unfortunately, however, the times had changed. Influenced by Rudolf Flesch‘s famous critique, Why Johnny Can’t Read (1955), schools had eliminated sight reading in their curricula in favor of a pure phonics approach. Fearing that, if reading became especially difficult, Stephen might loose his enthusiasm for books, and all the pleasures they proffered, I tripled my efforts to read to him. So, we read wonderful books–books such as Robert Lewis Stevenson’s, The Black Arrow, Treasure Island, and Kidnapped ; Dicken’s David Cooperfield, and Great Expectations; as well as Lloyd Alexander’s series The Prydian Chronicle. The rewards were immense: several years later, my son call me from the University of Virginia to announce that he was majoring in English.

A few weeks before Christmas I called my daughter-in-law, Haley, to find out what kinds of presents my grandchildren, Ben and Sophie, might like. She casually mentioned that my grandson was struggling with phonics. In particular, he was having difficulty sounding out words that contained the consonants th and wh. My heart sank! As soon as I hung up the phone, I drove to our neighborhood bookstore, Politics and Prose in search of some good books. There were many to be sure, but my most successful purchase turned out to be a kit for reading and writing hieroglyphics.

Egyptian Hieroglyphics

This kit was a great hit at Christmas. More importantly, my grandson Ben used it to write his first letter to me. I can’t wait to get a kit of my own, and keep up the correspondence.

Reading and economics–it seems–have something in common: in both cases, there are many ways to skin a cat. As importantly, one size does not fit all.

On Technorati: Books, Flesch, phonics, Polanyi, reading, reading difficulties, sight reading, Walras, Why Johnny Can't Read

Over the past several months, as it appeared that we might get a new Administration, support for, and speculations about, reviving the Office of Technology Assessment have been on the rise. In Congress, New Jersey Congressman Rush Holt has been carrying the flag.

But support is growing even at the grass roots level. Take, for example, the new online support group, Hey, hey–let’s reopen-the ota-with citizen input, which gets considerable play on my facebook page. The group has also set up a predictive market that allows members to wager on OTA’s future.

My prediction is that OTA will be revived, and–putting my money where my mouth is–I am prepared to bet heavily on it. But my rationale is not analytically grounded. As in any betting situation, it is a gut reaction, made in the face of uncertainty. Given my hopes and passions about a revived OTA, I would vote based not on a careful analysis of all the complex variables but rather in response to the excited signals coming from the emotional center of my brain.

It

This is just what Dan Ariely, author of Predictable Irrationality would predict–even in the case of experts. As he points out, individual predictions about uncertain events are rarely based on rational assessments; moreover, because they are typically ladened with considerable emotional baggage, such predictions are typically way off the mark.

If–as I suspect–others are like me, it would behoove OTA’s supporters to rethink the rationale that they use to promote the revival of OTA. Responding to critics from the past, who argued that OTA’s reports were untimely and therefore unresponsive to Congress’ day-to-day legislative needs, OTA’s supporters have generally sought to demonstrate OTA’s positive impact by linking its reports to subsequent Congressional legislation. Perhaps that is not what is most important. Reading recent books about uncertainty–such as Leonard Mlodinow’s The Drunkards’ Walk and Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, I’m more and more convinced that what decision makers need today, in this age of complexity and high uncertainty, is a way to think holistically and creatively about the possibility of future outliers and unanticipated events–metaphorically described by Taleb as Black Swans. As he emphasizes, we are fooled by our belief that we can make sense of the world by reducing problems down to what we know. The demon in all of this, he says, is:

not just the bell curve and the self-deceiving statistician, nor the Platonified scholar who needs theories to fool himself with. It is the drive to ‘focus’ on what make sense to us. Living in our planet, today, requires a lot more imagination that we are made to have. We lack imagination and repress it in others (The Black Swan, p. xxvii)

Ironically, anticipating the future was one of OTA’s original goals, and holism was the method used to achieve it. In fact, many of our studies were highly successful in this regard. Speaking of my own work, for example, I would point to Intellectual Property Rights in An Age of Electronics and Information, which anticipated how networking technology might undermine the copyright and patent systems; Electronic Enterprises: Looking to the Future which pointed out how network architecture would determine the future of the networked economy; Global Standards: Building Blocks for the Future, which identified the need for a global standards strategies long before the Chinese decided to become major players in this arena.

No doubt, these are uncertain times. Today, we are trying to make sense of recent, unanticipated disasters, such as the outcome of the war in Iraq and Afganistan and the recent colossal market crash. These events are Black Swans; Could they have been anticipated? I doubt it, given the way knowledge generation is organized in bureaucratic universities and disciplinary silos, where creativity and the cross fertilization of ideas and methodologies is generally inhibited. But OTA was designed to identify Black Swans. To this end, it fostered an interdisciplinary culture, a more relaxed research methodology, and reached out to a broad array of thinkers and publics. Would not a refunded OTA be best suited to address the present situation?

Recognizing that people are becoming more and more anxious in the face of uncertainty, and highly unanticipated events, I propose a new narrative for marketing OTA. Technology Assessment to the Rescue! This is not only a good idea; it gets you right in the guts.

On Technorati: Add new tag, Congressman Rush, Higher Education, Mlodinow, policymaking, randomness, Taleb, technology assessment, the bell curve, the Black Swan, uncertainty