The importance of theories

Interesting post over at Blattman (by the way, I can’t believe Freakonomics attacked Blattman with such viciousness; have a bit of class, will ya?). Emphasis are mine.

My favorite discovery of past weeks are Yale’s open courses, for video or podcast.

Right now I’m about a third of my way through Steven Smith’s Introduction to political philosophy and Ian Shapiro’s Moral Foundations of Politics. Highly, highly recommended.

…hard to understand what the political theorists were writing about. What use was revisiting 2000-year-old tomes?…They tackle the first and most fundamental questions in politics: What makes a state legitimate? What makes a good life? What is a responsible citizen to do? What are our obligations towards others?

Every course of new book on development, whether it seeks “why people are poor” or “why nations fail”, and every public policy or Millennium Development Goal–all of these implicitly have an answer to these deeper questions. The answer, though, is almost never explicit, even sometimes to the authors themselves.

I’m reminded of one of my favorite Keynes quotes: “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”

Interesting to read this right after I made a post about being more of an implementer than a theorists. I completely agree with Blattman, of course. Theory has always been, and always will be, important. We organize our world, of what is possible or not, desirable or not, according to paradigms. We can only understand and deconstruct paradigms through theories. We can only try to step away and look at our current path from a more objective view through theories. Hence, we can only change society through good action stemming from good theoretical background.

That being said, I’m still more of an implementer, I think. Or rather, I’d like to be an implementer who provides feedback to theorists. Only together can we actually make a change.