 Thanks very much Rachel. Thanks to all of you for coming. I'm I know enough economics to know that there's probably a very strong Selection effect amongst those in the audience if you think the idea of interdisciplinarity is completely ridiculous. You're probably not here So if you're a halfway home already just by revealed preference I'm hopefully you got to give you something to use when perhaps you find yourself engaging in these kinds of discussions with your colleagues As Rachel mentioned, I've worked in the research department of the World Bank since 1998 I'm the first and only non-economist not a sociologist the first and only non-economist out of a hundred people Ever hired in the research department. That means literally every research grant. I write every working paper I put together every bid for promotion every single word of it has to be vetoed by people that don't have the training I do On the scale of human difficulty on a one to skin don't attend to sort of scale It's probably about a minus 50 in terms of what serious problems in the world actually need Nonetheless, it is an existential kind of question when you are engaged in doing this kind of work and know that she's yet again I've got to try and figure out how to say this in nice little language and then deal with Or you can't use jargon when it's totally fine to use opportunity cast and whatever As part of your language when you're living in someone else's world But that's kind of what I feel like actually so I'm on a on a weird day I usually say I'm sort of a I'm a Hindu working at the Vatican. I'm sort of this I have a very I like to think for a Internally coherent, but to the outside looks like it's all over the place kind of view of how the world works And yet I'm surrounded and ruled by people who have a very Popish kind of view about what counts as a question or what counts as an answer, right? And sort of what lesson one of sociology I would have thought right from at least I thought from the beginning was that we all reside in this Wonderful jargon ish term called epistemic communities We all the whole structuring of academic life around this concept of disciplines is that we are members of particular sects within particular Religions and those religions have to kind of get on with each other and so the argument for Multidisciplinary was not sort of we should split the difference between Hinduism and Catholicism and sort of make up a new thing It's like how do we get these guys to take each other seriously? How do we how do we be respectful? How do we Understand them in their own terms and yet figure out that on a good day Bringing those two groups in a conversation with each other can actually yield all sorts of insights that just tripling down on Your own little field and nudging the crystal a little degree so that you can get a few extra stars in your regression model Just doesn't do it. And I so from them. I know it makes how I'm hard-wired in my brain But I just never got excited about having ever refiner estimates that x causes of y controlling for a bunch of z's I just said no I'm much more bigger picture I'm much more wanting to actually solve real problems in the world and see social sciences contributing to the resolution of those problems and problems Again from undergraduate level methodology problems should determine the kinds of methods and then that you are you is not the other way around and yet So much of elite academia at least I think Completely reverses that and starts with method and then spends years of its life trying to acquire ever refiner Knowledge of that particular technique and then chooses the questions that that particular technique happens to be able to answer Anyway, so my life has been spent trying to apply my trade enough in a foreign land and That's been an exciting adventure Largely because as I said, I've tried to see that this is something that is Motivated by solving problems. I'm not trying to convert people to my religion. I'm trying to show that that we can together Make a difference and in least in the World Bank the metric of your of your success is are you telling me something? I don't know are you helping me to make this project work a little better than it would be otherwise and I think when you have that as the as the foundation on which you Go forward and the basis of what you work then You can find all sorts of opportunities for bringing different Perspectives to bear so one of those particular fields that I've The four years ago published a book on with a World Bank colleague in the research department and with others was on history 10 years ago. I was part of a well-developed report team on inequality and You know pretty Part of that conversation we reached the conclusion that was already been reached before under some context matters But a history matters where institutions come from Must in some sense be grounded in history but as it turned out at a particular time two very wonderful human beings very influential Economist Jim Robinson and Darren Archimoglu We're doing we're making huge waves as as young scholars at the time trying to show that history mattered because they had a Wonderful instrument for settler mortality back in the 18th century that they now could use Eureka like to publish articles in the QJ if showing that history mattered and It was just surreal to me That we are now we're in a world where we could where the epistemic community was now in the Headspace where they could think about something called history because we had some Instrument back from the 18th century that now could prove that history mattered and I said well Maybe if we concede that history matters, maybe historians matter, right? If we went to a conference where the big conclusion was economics matters, but we didn't have to consult economists We would all think that was kind of weird right so I said well Maybe if we reached a conclusion that history matters We should actually consult one of the most ancient and venerable disciplines that existed way before Economics even came to think of itself as a discipline and we should consult those guys and maybe they can teach us something about how The world and these things called institutions came to be what they are right not long after that I found myself in this very high level meeting at the World Bank There was a big meeting on The Middle East and What we could what we the research department could sort of contribute to the broader Knowledge of what was being done and I won't name this particular colleague But they just stood up and stand front of a group of Middle Eastern people Middle Eastern professionals people who spent their whole life Working on this particular issue and say well, you know we've got this great data from the from the from the Western Europe that and this Settling mortality day that really helps us to be able to understand how institutions came to work in Europe But in the Middle East, we're kind of we just it's a big black box We don't have any knowledge really about the way that institutions work in the Middle East. I'm just going There are frickin forests that have been felled about Understanding the history of the Middle East and why the Middle East is awaited. How do we construct a universe in which? Everything is a black box that doesn't happen to fit into the particular Epistemic communities rules about what counts as a question and what counts as an answer Right, so the whole virtue it seemed to me of a very non-radical kind of thing Well, if we take history seriously, we should take historians here if we take historians seriously Then there's this whole vast treasure trove of knowledge out there That you've just completely ruled out of existence because you choose to rule it out of existence because your own little club Your own little sects within that club within that religion deems it so Right, and so I think one of the most basic things we should be doing is just having a much richer intellectual history about how We've constructed the tone in terms of scholarly debate within social sciences in general How we kind of come to? frame and set up Monopolies essentially around what counts as a question and what counts as an answer in my world in my view I'm all for free trade. I'm all for I think monopolies are bad. What happens with monopolies? They come on 101 they create inefficiencies because they don't allow for the high barriers to entry that I don't like people trade when they should be trading I think we should be much more in a world where we allow Ideas to trade where we allow Evidence to trade and then we do what a market does determines who wins this in some sense because of a broader structure that then allows that to happen one of the consequences of that though I think is that we have to tolerate on a higher standard deviation in the call it in the work that we do and I think that's one of the Frustrations perhaps of having a life spent doing interdisciplinary at the intersection of interdisciplinary work and I will concede Even within my own field of sociology there is just I think a much higher standard deviation of work that there is I will freely concede a whole bunch of stuff that really is qualitative blah blah That it is kind of dumb and it just really it isn't kind of Just makes me just had that stuff every get out the door, right? But you're gonna tolerate some of that It seems to me as the price you pay for getting the genius at the other end So let's actually treat this momentarily as an empirical phenomena and go to our wonderful favorite Google tools scholar Google and look at how what the data says about the distribution of Publications right as it happens the journal nature did a wonderful article 11 months ago on the top 100 citations of all time in any field, right? So this is physics biochemistry biology you name it here We have just a rank ordering from one down to a hundred of the top all-time scholarly contributions as measured by citations by others in the field The top citation now is an article from 1956 and physics with over a quarter of a million citations The median by the way is one For all citations ever but there's a really crazy distribution about how many articles or books Bioconomous do you think there are in that top 100? guess There are seven two of them are by Michael Porter, right? So probably some of us with a slight arrogance and others. Yeah, that's not really economics, right? So maybe competitive advantage of nations that economic Greens econometrics textbook is the is number two on the list There's William Oliver Williamson Doug North and a handful of others in the theory of the firm If you generously include Michael Porter the seven Well before you get to any of an Adam Smith, sorry is on that list as well. So there's your seven, right? There are 19 by non-economists number six on the list all-time most cited any field ever Robert Lynn's book on case studies Well over a hundred thousand citations, right? How many economy how many how many in the room? I didn't know that before I was going wow Isn't amazing like that whole particular methodology approach to doing things is way more cited than anything ever written on econometrics You would not know that if you didn't know that there was this other whole field All of us there's like four of the major qualitative textbooks are on this top 100 ever cited Michael Foucault's work has been cited over half a million times as H scores way higher than a martier and and and Joe Stiglitz That whole field is out there, right? But it's read I think it's a really high standard deviation It means that there are geniuses out there was a bunch of dunces as well and in my world I'm quite happy to tolerate a pretty high standard deviation in quality Because I think that's that at least at the cutting edge of thinking and doing you've got to tolerate a lot of crap to be able to get the Really good stuff happening and that to me is what the essence of doing good Dialogical work in the disciplinary space is all about I mentioned this stuff that we did we did in history Which and the whole purpose of this exercise was to try and take history seriously How did we actually get ministries of education and health to actually form when they did? Where did social protection come from? Where did the idea that we should protect and support women and And and pensioners will come from where that was an idea before it was a policy where who thought that up who campaigned for it Who made it actually happen right? Those are the really powerful contributions that social historians can make to how we think about a whole bunch of different things in Development policy today another particular realm that I've worked in other than with economists who are my Most cited co-authors, but I've done a lot of work most recently over the last 10 years or so with lawyers The field of law and economics is another crazy bizarre field It seems to me that within the Vatican looks entirely normal and outside just looks surreal All right So one of the most cited field in the law and economics stuff is apply some institutions It's the stuff by La Porta, but that's all in QGE where the entire econometric model is what? We code the difference between common law and civil law 1 0 toss it into a regression stew And now we conclude plus that common law countries do better than civil law countries And they've been all sorts of not not a solemn nodding heads inside a an econometric seminar about Just that is just the lunacy level of that kind of way of thinking about what the law is How it comes to be the law and what the policy implications are of that kind of stuff is just nuts Right, but it's not nuts within the epistemic community that gets to define what the question is and what the answer is It makes entire sense and very solemn people can cannot their way now That's not to say that there is it there is something else out there Necessarily that's inherently better to say that for those kinds of questions for those kinds of challenges It's only the interdisciplinary dialogue that's gonna spark the craziness that will produce Maybe the insight that actually moves the thing forward. We're not in the world of physics We are social scientists whether you're an economist or an anthropologist Whereas doing social science the knowledge claims we make are inherently very qualified and so that's what's made to conclude That's what's made this you know the latest big debate over the summer in development economics as you may know It's been around the so-called warm wars, right? All these all these should we replicate and should we be have free open access to eat others data and should we Requiring that everybody right that that whole kerfuffle. It seems to me is just a product of a Very strange sort of way of thinking about what rigor means and what generalizability and external validity Claims you are entitled to having done particular kinds of modes of analytical reasoning And it should be no surprise at all that we get different people using similar data and getting different kinds of results Or at least different sort of on the margins. That's all normal science Number seven on the list of all-time publications Thomas Koons the structure of scientific revolutions is all about saying look these Knowledge communities are very powerful in terms of how they how they shape how we think and how we act And that's I think the most important lesson of what an interdisciplinary Sensibility should teach us is that we are inherently we are trained deeply Socialized into a particular epistemic community by getting a PhD. That's the other than the technical skills It's mostly socialization. It's teaching you how to function in this particular space the best article on that by the way He's an anthem is a bio economist Putting on the hat of an anthropologist talking about his own feel life among the econ Western Economic Journal 1973 the best article You've probably never read Look it up, right by a Swedish guy whose name. I'm not gonna butch. I'll butcher if I try and pronounce But he's at UCLA life among the econ. It's called life among the econ brilliant Satirical as relevant now as it was when it was written back in 1973 about how The tribe called the econ Socializes their young how they create a cast structure with the math econ at the top and the developments at the bottom and just beautiful Tongue-in-cheek. He totally gets the interdisciplinary thing He's trying to say this is how my profession works and without a self-consciousness that that's how your profession works Then you have no reason you can entirely dismiss the Hindus out there in the rest of the world And I'm all for religious pluralism. I'm all for linguistic pluralism Not just mashing all together and getting a lowest common denominator Not denominator because the big big problems we now face can only be happened by bringing all of these in together into a UN type space where we respect each other's differences We tolerate a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of crap, but we know that the nuggets of truth That's the only way we're gonna get the nugget of truth is if we tolerate that. Thanks very much