Not thinking like an economist vs. not thinking, like an economist

Noah Smith has an excellent post on the strange tendency of some economists to treat offensiveness as a sign of clear-thinking. You should read the whole thing, but first I want to take a moment to focus on this quote by Daniel Kuehn:

A lot of people don't get "thinking like an economist" when they see it, [In this case, the people who don't get "thinking like an economist" include Brad DeLong and Noah Smith, but I digress -- Mark*] and what I think Landsburg is doing here is "thinking like an economist", not being a jerk...

Thinking like an economist simply means that you scientifically approach human social behavior - which means that you approach them like any other species of animal. Nobody judges animals when they behave in ways that we would consider horrendous in other humans. They're just... animals. And that's what you really need for good social science. You need to look at your fellow humans as "just animals". Astonishing, wondrous animals to be sure - but just animals...

It's absolutely critical for good economists to see the world in this way...I suspect [Landsburg] was "thinking like an economist". The problem is, of course, it flowed over from scientific analysis of human behavior to a commentary on a single individual human being[.]

[Landsburg] dotted all his i's and crossed all his t's on the analysis, because he's good at thinking like an economist.

We've been through this before. Steve Levitt used the thinking-like-an-economist line to dismiss critics. I found it lacking at the time and it hasn't grown on me since then but it should be noted that even at his worst, Levitt is making an effort to approach questions scientifically. I don't believe that a majority (or even a plurality) of Levitt's critics disagree with him because he's too logical, but at least it's a claim that can be made with a straight face.

Landsburg's defense of Limbaugh is an entirely different beast. There's no trace of a scientific process here or of any thoughtful process at all for arriving at a position. Landsburg simply reacted angrily when he saw people he didn't like say things he disagreed with. Unfortunately, he expressed that anger with a spectacularly shoddy attempt at an argument that misrepresented the original facts, mangled the reasoning and required the reader to make up new definitions for most of the operative words.

By applying it to Landsburg's Fluke post, Kuehn has stretched the thinking-like-an-economist defense to the point that if covers pretty much any statement, no matter how incoherent, as long as it includes something offensive to the general public.

(for more to this topic, check out this post by Andrew Gelman.)


UPDATE: Daniel Kuehn argues here that Smith misrepresented his original post. Read both and come to your own conclusion.

* And just to be clear, this bracketed statement was an editorial insert by me, not an aside by Kuehn.