PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics) is an increasingly popular undergraduate and graduate major. In practice there are two models: one is what I like to call a confederate model: in this approach students take a mixture of courses from the three contributing disciplines. One is what I like to call a federated model: in this approach students take a mixture of courses from the three contributing disciplines and then jointly (or partially) bring these to bear on a capstone topic (a paper, thesis, project, etc.) Most PPE programs I am familiar with fall somewhere between these two models.
Obviously other options are possible, including the reflexive option in which students study the three contributing topics, in part, from each others's perspectives (i.e, philosophy and politics of economics, the economics of philosophy, etc.) A final approach would be the integrated model in which students take some courses from the three contributing disciplines, but primarily are learning to apply them jointly (as mutually supporting, mixed methods). Obviously these approaches can be blended in various ways and the list is not exhaustive.
Recently I visited the third annual PPE conference in New Orleans, and to my surprise I came away thinking that PPE may be a viable research area. I think this for a number of sociological reasons: first, the number of PPE programs is growing and so are their enrollments.* This means that there is steady hiring in PPE. Second, while the (quite popular) confederate model means one can hire faculty without much interest in PPE to teach within PPE, hiring folk with fondness and interest in PPE prevents downstream troubles. These two reasons are, we may say, demand-led.
But third, what struck me hard at the PPE conference is that there is now a critical mass of people ((ahh) the supply side) that are confident in offering and evaluating arguments and proposals with competence derived from at least two of the three contributing areas, while maintaining (a) shared conversation, and (b) being capable of informed and overlapping criticism(s), and (c) without disagreements wholly being methodological. In addition, while the conference attracts quite a number of market friendly types -- this became clear during a straw-poll taken by Al Roth during his lecture on kidney selling -- PPE is clearly not synonymous with 'libertarian friendly' or 'heterodox economist.' Quite a few sessions explored criticism of really existing capitalism.+
As an aside, during the past year I read (recall) James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, which gave me a (relatively) contemporary exemplar in what PPE research could be. This autobiographical example is connected to what take to be one of the main problems with the (fast growing and developing) PPE society: political science is primarily represented by political theorists (and philosophers masquerading as political theorists) and that there is little contribution from the rather large group of political economists in political science departments (of a sort that publish in journals like Review of International Political Economy, New Political Economy, and European Journal of Political Economy among others). That philosophers and economics find it easy to talk to each other is no surprise -- we share overlapping methods and research topics (decision theory, Bayes, justice, welfare, future generations, etc.), even overlapping research cultures.
But (inter alia) political scientists bring facility with mixed methods to the table as well as a focus on power. Political scientists are also naturally at ease with theorizing about far-from-ideal and especially messy circumstances (in ways that P&E are not).** Non-trivially, political scientists also have much better developed research ethics toward would-be-research subjects (while philosophers and economists tend to assume that research ethics is limited to not getting caught plagiarizing [okay that (see here) may be changing]).
So, what could PPE research be? A lot of it will be folks doing research in one of the three core disciplines while drawing on or engaging with one of the others (much of what I do fits in this category). But here's one possible, more ambitious answer: something akin to synthetic philosophy. Recall that:
So, understood quite a bit of PPE is already (developing into) synthetic philosophy: work on climate justice, obligations to future generations, the institutions and norms of transition economies, institutions and norms of uncertainty, the political economies of migration are all fertile areas that mix normative theorizing and various social sciences.*** More subtly topics that have been sidelined in the constitutive disciplines may be quite important in developing PPE into synthetic philosophy. I give two examples, first philosophers are wont to think that poverty is exhausted by the difference principle; but in fact, poverty impacts all kinds of significant projects (migration, international law, hunger, intersection with gender and parenting, etc.). Second, philosophy of education has almost no status anymore within contemporary philosophy (sorry); but the political economy and philosophy of education matters a lot to development, migration, and future oriented projects within PPE.++
One may suspect that what makes PPE a viable research area is the felt need to combine normative theorizing (the strength of philosophy) with social science research (the strengths of Ps&E). I don't think this is mistaken; but it's not the whole truth. In part it is not the whole truth because much of the theory required -- that is normatively sensitive and sensible [and avoids noxious status quo bias] -- is still to be developed within such social science(s).+++ So, it's not the whole truth because philosophy can contribute more than pre-existing normative theory. And in part because the social sciences supply more than just empirical knowledge/theory; Ps&E also supply a large range of methods and familiarity with policy environments.
The previous paragraphs are, of course, a promissory note.
For those that worry that even PPE as (integrated) synthetic philosophy is philosophy hegemonic (or merely cleverly piggybacking on the social status of economics), I am open to the idea that the future of PPE really is Synthetic Philosophy Science.
*I ignore here why this is so.
+Of course, Libertarians can be vocal critics of the rent-seeking capitalism.
**In one sense: political science is also a kind of Trojan horse in incorporating and adopting methods and insights from other social sciences! Philosophers and economists (recall) share a (misguided) disdain for, say, sociology and anthropology; political science offers them political sociology without the sociologists and ethnography without the anthropologists!
***See below.
++In case you are worried about special pleading: none of the topics mentioned in this paragraph -- except the focus on uncertainty -- are my areas of research.
+++I learned about the significance of this from my student, Lea Klarenbeek, who is developing new conceptual tools and measures to study integration.
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