Don’t Want a Robot to Replace You? Study Tolstoy

From Naked Capitalism:

Why having explored the humanities is a career plus.

Yves here. Some confirmation of this article’s thesis on the value of studying the humanities comes from Google’s study of the differentiating characteristics of its best managers. This list is ranked in order of importance. Note where technical skills fit in.

Be a good coach;
empower your team and don’t micromanage;
express interest in employee’s success and well-being;
be productive and results-oriented;
be a good communicator and listen to your team;
help your employees with career development;
have a clear vision and strategy for the team; and
have key technical skills, so you can help advise the team.

Now admittedly, you have to have technical chops to get hired at Google, but having those undervalued soft skills makes a difference the long run makes, and studying art and literature helps cultivate them. By contrast, studies suggest that studying economics reduces empathy.

Having said all of that, it’s still distressing to see that the rationale for education is mercenary, and not about being a better citizen and having broad-based cultural knowledge.

Economist Morton Schapiro, president of Northwestern University, and his colleague, literary critic and Slavic studies scholar Saul Morson, argue that—contrary to popular belief—studying the humanities is the key to not getting outsourced.

Morton Schapiro, president of Northwestern University, is an economist. Gary Saul Morson, his colleague, does close readings of Tolstoy. Together they teach a course on what economists can learn from the humanities and have co-authored a book, Cents and Sensibility, on the same theme. In the following conversation, they offer insights on how students can get ahead in the job market, what universities are for, why economists should read great novels, and more.

Lynn Parramore: You argue that economists need to know what makes human beings tick and they need to understand ethics, culture and narrative. Why do you feel so strongly about this?

Morton Schapiro: Economists do a good job applying our theories and tools to subjects that are normally associated with other fields, such as the cycle of poverty, individual behavior, and so on. But there’s evidence in citations and surveys that economists approach other fields in a more imperialistic way than they probably should. Saul points out that there’s an idea that other fields have the great questions and economists have the all the answers. Economics brings a lot to these other fields, but these other fields could bring a lot more to economics. One that’s far-flung from what economists usually think of as a basis for useful knowledge is literature.

Saul Morson: Some things can only be explained by stories, like great novels. Ethical questions can be endlessly complex, which is a central theme of great authors like George Eliot. The realistic model of people you get in literature is a lot closer to what people really are like than what you often find in economics.

By the very nature of needing to mathematicize their theories, economists can’t account for some things. You can’t mathematicize culture. A lot of theories covertly smuggle in certain cultural assumptions, like the notion that everybody is like an American. But everybody is not. What looks like an economic model turns out to be a cultural model, and cultures really do differ.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/02/dont-want-robot-replace-study-tolstoy.html