Canned

David Brooks' column in the NYT today elicited some nostalgia during the morning espressos.  The column is a thumbnail history of economics as a science or discipline.  The early years of struggle to found a science, phase two investigation of the mathematics of the rational agent in a market, and so on to the new 'behaviorist economics' and the future of economics as art.  Nostalgia because so much of the development he sketched as new, at the edge, etc., isn't.  All the problems of rational agents and the import of psychology and sociology on economics was the subject of extensive discussion and exploration back in the long dead days of 1980's, at least in graduate philosophy programs addressing political theory.  (And, by the by, Tversky is not an economist - his work is psychology.)  From which one might draw inferences about the superiority, etc., but I wouldn't.  I think the interesting aspect is that the work done in the philosophy departments never filtered out, or did so only decades later.  Another aspect of the silo effect is the paucity of attention paid in philosophy departments to either the Milgram experiments or the Stanford prison experiment.  One would think those studies tremendously important for moral psychology and for virtue theories.  Mostly, however, that work was ignored.  (John Dorris' Lack of Character, after all has only been out about 5 years.)  A lot of ideal theory, not so labeled, and no much consideration of how people live -- duty under despotism, that is what we need more of.