Don't Look for Big Pictures: In Conversation with Jon Elster

What can social scientists tell us about the world? How do psychology and history enrich economics? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Jon Elster sits down with Mark Pennington to discuss the essential tasks and limitations of social science. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify Subscribe to the Governance Podcast on iTunes and Spotify today and get all our latest episodes directly in your pocket. Follow Us For more information about our upcoming podcasts and events, follow us on facebook or twitter (@csgskcl). The Guest Jon Elster is the Robert K. Merton Professor of the Social Sciences at Columbia University. Before coming to Columbia, he taught in Paris, Oslo and Chicago. His publications include Ulysses and the Sirens (1979), Sour Grapes (1983), Making Sense of Marx (1985), The Cement of Society (1989), Solomonic Judgements (1989), Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (1989), Local Justice (1992) and Political Psychology (1993). His research interests include the theory of rational choice, the theory of distributive justice and the history of social thought (Marx and Tocqueville). He is currently working on a comparative study of constitution-making processes from the Federal Convention to the present and on a study of retroactive justice in countries that have recently emerged from authoritarian or totalitarian rule. Research interests include Theory of Rational Choice and the Theory of Distributive Justice. Skip Ahead 0:57: You’re giving a talk at our Centre called ‘Emotions in History.’ Can you explain the argument? 3:54: A lot of your work in the past has been engaged with rational choice models or economic models applied to various social phenomena in one form or another. You’re now mentioning the role of psychology. What role should psychology play in relation to the kind of rationality-oriented work you’ve done in the past? 6:04: So you’re saying that common sense rationality can play a role in understanding political institutions or economic institutions, or individual behaviour within them? 7:38: You say that about some of the Chicago-school understandings of institutions which imply that the institutions that are chosen are efficient in some sense—because if they weren’t, rational agents would change them. Then it’s hard to account for any sort of institutional change because equilibrium is built into the model. 8:50: If we don’t explain the origin of institutions through a rational choice model, or at least if that model has quite serious limitations, is there any way in which a model that focuses on the psychological dimension or the emotional dimension provides a better explanation? 10:38: Would your view of institutions be more along the kind of model that recognizes that institutions are often the products of accidents that arise from conjunctions of all kinds of eventualities that really don’t necessarily have more universal implications? 11:32: What can we say—or can we say anything—about whether certain kinds of institutions have beneficial properties relative to other kinds of institutions? 13:54: If we go back to this role of emotion: if emotion is an important factor in shaping institutions, the way they’re formed and perhaps even the way they persist, that strikes me to imply that… people, because of emotion, create certain institutional structures that could be inefficient or malfunction in various ways… 16:49: What I was wondering was whether you were working with a model where emotional choice influences the way in which institutions are originally created, but then within that set of rules, is that the level at which a more rational choice type model kicks in? Or is it emotions all the way down? 18:26: I want to come to some of what you’ve written on the role of prediction within social science… but what I take from what you’ve just said there about the importance of specific cases and not generalizing too much is that you would be against the idea that even if we recognize the ro