Chapter 3 A Scientist's Education

A Scientist's Education In Belfast, when you grow up as a Catholic, a rebellious spirit naturally develops in your character, said Brian Arthur, speaking in the soft, rising tones characteristic of Belfast up.It's not that he actually felt oppressed.His father was a bank manager, and his family was a solid middle-class family.The only sectarian incident in which he was personally involved occurred one afternoon when a group of Christian boys threw bricks and stones at him as he was walking home in his mission school uniform.A brick hit him in the forehead. (Blood from his forehead got into his eyes and blocked his view—but he threw the brick back hard.) But he didn't think Christians were really devils.His mother had been a Christian, but converted to Catholicism after marrying his father.Nor has he ever felt particularly political.His interests lean more towards ideas and philosophy.

However, the spirit of rebellion still seems to seep into his character from the air. "Irish culture doesn't teach you to lead, it teaches you to sabotage," he said.Look who the Irish look up to: Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmett, Daniel O'Connell, Pedrek Perth. "All Irish heroes are revolutionaries. And the highest form of heroism is to lead a revolution that has no hope of victory, and then, on the eve of your hanging, make the greatest speech of your life from the bench." "In Ireland, the call to obey authority has never worked." It was, he said, the rebellious nature of the Irish that in an odd way led him to his academic career.Catholics in Belfast have a tendency to be extremely contemptuous of intellectuals.So, of course he wanted to be an intellectual himself.In fact, he remembers wanting to be a "scientist" as early as four years old, long before he even knew what a scientist was.Simply because the idea of ​​being a scientist has an indescribably seductive and mysterious quality to it.However, if the young Brian only had such ideas without such determination, he would not be a scientist.When he was in school, he was involved in engineering, physics and rigorous mathematics from the beginning. In 1966, he won a first-class honors in electromechanical engineering at Queen's University in Belfast.His mother said, "Ah, I think you're going to end up as a little professor somewhere." Actually, his mother was very proud of him.No one in her generation in the family had yet gone to college.

In 1966, this same determination led him across the Irish Channel to the University of Lancaster in England, where he began to study operations research, a very mathematical graduate course— — This engineering course is basically a set of calculation techniques, calculating how to make a factory get the most output with the least input, or calculating how to maintain control of a fighter jet that has been accidentally hit. "At that time, the state of British industry was very bad. I thought, maybe we can use science to reorganize industry and solve the current problems." Arthur said.

In 1967, when he discovered that the professors at Lancaster University were all stupid and depraved to the point of being unbearable—"It would be nice to have an Irishman in our department, it would add a little color to us." Arthur did his best to imitate in a dull, snobby British accent—he left there for the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, USA.Arthur said: "As soon as I set foot in the United States, I felt like I came home. It was the sixties, the people there were very open, the culture was very open, and the science education in the United States was world-class. In the United States, it seemed that everything was possible. of."

But unfortunately one thing was impossible in Ann Arbor, and that was that the place did not lead directly to the mountains and the sea which Arthur loved.So starting in the fall of 1969, Arthur transferred to Berkeley for a Ph.D.To get the money to get him through school, he applied for a summer job at McKinsey, one of the world's premier management consulting firms, the summer before he transferred to Berkeley. His luck was incredible.Arthur didn't realize how lucky he was until later.People scrambled to get hired at McKinsey, and the firm valued his background in operations research and his knowledge of German.They need to send someone to work in the Düsseldorf branch and ask him if he is interested.

Is he interested?This was the golden opportunity of a lifetime for Arthur.The last time he went to Germany, he worked a summer blue-collar job for seventy-five cents an hour. This time he went to Germany again, at the age of twenty-three, to teach the board members of BASF (BASF) how to solve the oil problem. sector and the gas sector, or how to run a fertilizer company worth several hundred million dollars. “I learned from it that managing at the top is as easy as managing at the bottom,” he laughs. But McKinsey did more than just gild him personally.McKinsey is basically a firm that sells contemporary American management techniques (a concept that didn't sound as strange in 1969 as it did fifteen years later)."The thing about European companies at the time was that every big company had hundreds of subsidiaries. They didn't even know what they owned," Arthur said. Arthur found himself very interested in getting into this kind of chaos. Go among the questions of order and get first-hand information on the formation of these questions. “McKinsey is truly world-class. They’re not selling theory, they’re not selling any fancy stuff. They solve problems by being fully involved in the intricacies of the situation, just living it, feeling it. The team sent by McKinsey usually stays in a company for five or six months, or even longer, to study a series of extremely complex situations and interrelationships until the patterns are clearly understood. Then we Everyone would sit around the desk, and one would say, 'This must be the way it is, for whatever reason.' Another would say, 'If this is the case, then that's the way it should be. That's how it's going to work out.' And then we'll go out of the office and check it out. Maybe the general manager of one of the local divisions will say, 'Well, you're basically right, but you're missing this or that.' So We spend months again clarifying the problem again and again until it is completely clear. The answer to solve the problem naturally emerges in this process.”

It didn't take long for Arthur to realize that the nifty equations and fancy math he'd spent so much time mastering at school were only tools—and limited ones at that—when he was confronted with the complex real world.What matters most is one's insight, the ability to see how things are interconnected.Ironically, it was this realization that led him to economics.He still clearly remembers the situation at that time.That was before he was about to leave McKinsey for Berkeley.One night, he and his American boss, George Taucher, were driving through the Ruhr Valley in western Germany, the industrial center of Germany.During the drive, Douche started talking about the history of each company they've worked with—which company owned what for a hundred years, how the whole thing developed organically and historically.

here.This was a new discovery for Arthur. "It dawned on me that this is economics." If he wanted to understand the chaotic world that had drawn him so strongly, if he wanted to make a real difference in people's lives, he had to study economics. Therefore, after that summer, Arthur rushed to Berkeley with a high thirst for knowledge.Knowing nothing about economics, he declared that economics was what he wanted to learn. In fact, he didn't want to come back so late to change the court again.At the University of Michigan, he has completed most of the doctoral courses in operations research, and the rest is just completing the doctoral dissertation.Each Ph.D. candidate completes a voluminous dissertation with his or her own original research to demonstrate that he or she has mastered the skill.But Arthur still had plenty of time to write his dissertation: UC insisted that he must live in Berkeley for three years to qualify for a Ph.D.So Arthur was allowed to take all the economics courses he could in his spare time.

So he did. "But the McKinsey experience made me very disappointed in economics. Here, my sense of history is not as strongly attracted as it was in the Ruhr Valley." He said.In Berkeley classrooms, economics is like a branch of pure mathematics."Neoclassical" economics, known as the basic theory of economics, has reduced this colorful and intricate world to a series of narrow and abstract laws that can be written in a few pages.All textbooks are full of mathematical equations.The best young economists seem to dedicate their careers to proving theorems, regardless of whether they have anything to do with the real world.Arthur said: "I am amazed at the importance economics puts on mathematics. To me, coming from the field of applied mathematics, a theorem is a statement of a permanent and unchanging mathematical truth - not a lot of formulas to dress up the right Trivial observations."

He could not help feeling that economic theory was oversimplified.No, it wasn't mathematical rigor he was objecting to.He likes mathematics.After spending years studying electrical engineering and operations research, he had a much better mathematical background than most of his economics classmates.No, it was the unreasonable unreality of economics that bothered him.Econometricians have so successfully transformed their discipline into a pseudophysics in which all human frailties and passions have been filtered out.Their theory portrays man with animal instincts as something like a particle: "Economic Homo," a god-like being.The rational mind of these beings is always flawless, always in the dispassionate pursuit of predictable self-interest.Just as a physicist can predict how a particle will respond to any particular set of forces, an economist can predict how Homo Econ will respond to any particular economic situation: he (or it) It will just give full play to its "practical function" to the extreme.

Likewise, neoclassical economics portrays the economy as always in perfect equilibrium, where supply always exactly equals demand, where the stock market is never overwhelmed by madness and madness, and where no single company is powerful enough to monopolize the market. The magic of the perfect free market is always able to maximize economic benefits.Nothing reminded Arthur more of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century than this view.Philosophers of the Enlightenment saw the universe as a gigantic, clock-like contraption governed by Isaac Newton's perfect laws of operation.The only difference is that economists seem to see human society as a well-oiled machine run by the invisible hand of Adam Smith. He just couldn't buy into the idea that even though the free economy was wonderful, Adam Smith was a brilliant man.And to be fair, theorists of neoclassical economics have developed various elaborate formulations on basic economic models to cover things like uncertainty of prospects and inheritance of property.They have adapted the basic theories of economics to taxation, monopoly, international trade, employment, finance, monetary policy—everything economists can think of.But none of this changes the most fundamental assumptions.Economic theory still cannot describe the chaos and irrationality of the human world that Arthur saw in the Ruhr Valley—or, as he saw every day on the streets of Berkeley. Arthur didn't let these thoughts rot in his mind. “I think I pissed off a few professors by expressing very strongly my impatience with theorems and my intention to learn real economics,” he said.And he knows he's not alone.He often heard similar complaints in the aisle of the conference room when he attended the economic meeting. Yet another part of his nature found neoclassical economics to be suffocatingly beautiful.The knowledge of neoclassical economics is a fine art comparable to the physics of Newton and Einstein.The rigor, clarity, and accuracy of neoclassical economics made Arthur, who was a mathematician by nature, unable to fail to admire.And he can understand why older economists are so keen on it.When the previous generation of economists began to emerge, economics was in dire shape.He had heard horror stories.In the 1930s, the British economist John Maynard Keynes said that you could put five economists in a room and come to six different conclusions.Judging from various reports, he was being polite when he said that.Economists in the 1930s and 1940s were good at observation, but a little less logical.Even if their logical thinking is strong, you will still find that they will come to very different conclusions on the same problem: it turns out that they are approaching the problem from different, unstated assumptions.Therefore, academic debates between different factions will break out on major issues related to government policy or business cycle theory.In the forties and fifties, economists who had mastered mathematical theory were the young men of their time.They were a bunch of pompous fellows determined to clear the stables of economics and make it a science as rigorous and precise as physics.They've accomplished a lot and almost achieved their purpose.The young men who achieved this great success - Kenneth Arrow at Stanford, Paul Samuelson at MIT, Gerald Deb at Berkeley among them Nor (Gerard Debreu), Rochester's Tialling Koopmans and Lionel McKenzie - they're rightfully the great old, new Codex. Besides, as long as you want to study economics - and Arthur still decides to do it - what other theory is there to choose from?Marxist economics?Hey, this is Berkeley, Karl Marx certainly had followers, but Arthur wasn't one of them.In Arthur's view, such things as the progress of class struggle in various stages of social development that can be predicted by science are obviously stupid.No, the game may be a hoax, as some gambler once said, but it's the only game in town.So he could only continue to take his economics courses, determined to master this theoretical tool that did not convince him very much. Of course, during this time, Arthur has also been writing his doctoral dissertation on operations research research.His mentor, the mathematician Stuart Dreyfus, was an excellent teacher, and one of his kind.Arthur remembers going to introduce himself to Dreyfus's office shortly after arriving in Berkeley in 1969, when a graduate student with long hair and a beard happened to come out.Arthur asked him: "I'm looking for Professor Dreyfuss, can you tell me when he will be back?" "I am Dreyfuss," said the graduate student.His actual age is around forty years old. Dreyfuss reinforced what Arthur had learned at McKinsey and provided him with a powerful antidote to his economics courses.Arthur said: "Dreyfus believed in going straight to the heart of a problem. He taught me to keep simplifying until you think you can handle it, rather than solving unbelievably complicated equations right away. He asks you to find out the factors that make up the problem, find the key point, find the main parts and the main solution." Dreyfuss will not let him revel in fancy mathematical formulas for the sake of mathematics. Arthur understood Dreyfus' guidance. "His methods were neither good nor bad," said Arthur, a little sadly.If he later packaged his increasing rate of return with a thick mathematical formula, it may be more acceptable to those traditional economists.In fact, his colleagues also advised him to do so, but he just didn't want to."I wanted to make it as flat and concise as possible," he said. In 1970, Arthur returned to Düsseldorf and spent his second summer at McKinsey & Company.He found that this time attracted him as much as the first time.Sometimes he wonders whether he should keep in touch with McKinsey & Company, and when he graduates, he will be a top-level international management consulting expert, so that he can live a very luxurious life. But he didn't.He found himself fascinated by one of the more disorganized subjects of economics than the problems of European industry: the problem of population growth in the Third World. Of course, it didn't hurt him that this research project gave him the opportunity to come and go to the East-West Population Institute in Honolulu to conduct research.He also keeps a surfboard there, so he can go surfing at the beach whenever he wants.But he was serious about population issues.It was the early 1970s, and the population problem was looming large in front of the world.Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich just published his revelatory bestseller, The Population Bomb. The newly independent countries of the Third World, which were once colonies, are struggling for economic viability.Western economists have come up with one theory after another about how to help these countries.At the time, the most common and standard proposal was to emphasize economic determinism: all a country had to do to achieve population optimum was to give its people the right economic incentives to control their fertility so that they would automatically , rationally do what is in their own interests.In particular, many economists have suggested that if, or when, a country becomes a modern industrial state—certainly built on the Western model—the country's citizens will naturally undergo a "demographic transition," They automatically reduce their fertility to match the population fertility patterns prevailing in European countries. But Arthur believed he had a better, or at least a more sophisticated, angle to the problem: the analysis of population control in terms of "time delays," the title of his doctoral dissertation.He said: "It's a question of timing, if a government manages to reduce the birth rate today, ten years from now it will affect the size and number of schools, twenty years from now it will affect the country's workforce, thirty years from now it will affect It affects the population of the next generation, and in sixty years it will affect the number of retirees.” Mathematically, this is very much like trying to control a spaceship far beyond the solar system, and instructions take hours to get there; or like Adjust the temperature of your shower head, and there is a half-minute delay between when you adjust the head and when the hot water hits you.If you don't properly account for this delay, you're going to get burned. In 1973, Arthur included his analysis of the population problem in the final chapter of his doctoral dissertation: a tome full of mathematical formulas entitled: "The Application of Dynamic Programming in Time Delay Control Theory Application" (Dynamic Programming as Applied to Time-Delayed Control Theory). "This is a study of population issues from a very engineering perspective, and it is full of numbers." Arthur recalled regretfully.Despite his experience at McKinsey, his tutelage from Dreyfus, and his impatience with overly mathematical economics, he still felt the impulse that first led him to operations research: let's use Science and mathematics to make this society function rationally. "Most people in development economics have that attitude. They're the missionaries of the century, except instead of trying to bring Christianity to the heathen, they're trying to bring economic development to the third world." What shook him and brought him back to reality was his employment at a small New York think-tank, the Population Commission. He came to the Population Council in 1974, after completing his Ph.D. and a year of postdoctoral research in Berkeley's economics department.The Population Commission was too remote from the Third World for its location: it was in a mansion on Park Avenue, and its chairman was John Rockefeller III.But the committee does get serious about funding research into programs like contraception, family planning and economic development.Most importantly, from Arthur's point of view, the committee had a policy of getting researchers off their desks and into the research project site as much as possible. The director of the committee would ask, "Brian, what do you know about the population and development of Bangladesh?" "rare." "Do you want to find out about these things?" The trip to Bangladesh was an academic watershed for Arthur. He went there with demographer Geoffrey McNicoll in 1975.The Australian Geoffrey McNicaw was his graduate student classmate at Berkeley, but more importantly, he was the one who brought Arthur to the Population Committee.They arrived there on the first plane allowed into Bangladesh since a coup.They could still hear the sound of machine gun fire as the plane landed.After that they went to the country.There, they act like journalists doing investigative interviews. “We talked to the village chiefs, we talked to the women in the village, we talked to everybody. We kept visiting, trying to understand how rural society in Bangladesh works.” In particular, they wanted to find out why even After providing villagers with modern birth control measures free of charge, rural families still have an average of seven children — and villagers seem to be fully aware of their country's economic stagnation due to overpopulation. Arthur said: "We found that the terrible plight of Bangladesh is the result of the relationship between the individual interests of the villagers and the interests of the group." Having more children can bring great benefits.As a defenseless widow, relatives and neighbors are likely to come and take her property.Therefore, for her own benefit, a young wife should give birth to as many sons as possible as early as possible, so that when she is old, there will be grown-up sons to protect her.Hence the saying: "Patriarchs, women struggling to hold on to their husbands, agrarian society—all these interests conspire to create a phenomenon in which having too many children hinders development." After six weeks in Bangladesh, Arthur and McNicaw returned to the United States and, after assimilating information and materials obtained in Bangladesh, published their research in the Journal of Anthropology and Sociology.Arthur's first stop after returning to the United States was Berkeley. He went to the economics department there to read some reference materials.He remembered that when he was in the economics department, he happened to look through the latest economics class schedule in the department.It was pretty much the same lessons he had learned long ago. “But I suddenly had this strange impression that I had been at a distance from the center of economics, that economics had changed in the year I had been away. Then I realized the truth: economics had not changed. It was me who changed," he said.After the trip to Bangladesh, all this neoclassical economics that he had spent so much time mastering became irrelevant to him. "I suddenly felt a general relief. It was like a weight was lifted from me. I no longer had to believe in neoclassical economics! I felt a great freedom." Arthur and McNicaw co-wrote an eighty-page survey study, published in 1978, that became a classic in the social sciences—and immediately banned by the Bangladeshi government. (The two authors pointed out that the Bangladeshi government has basically lost control of the vast rural areas outside the capital, and this area is basically controlled by the feudal godfathers. This deeply annoyed the upper echelons of the capital Dhaka.) But in any case, Other investigators sent by the Population Commission to Syria and Kuwait returned only to confirm and reinforce his and McNicaw's point: Approaching Third World population problems from a mathematical and The idea of ​​responding to economic stimulus in the United States—a very limited program at best.Economics, as any historian and anthropologist can tell, is as tightly entangled with politics and culture.This lesson may be very obvious, but Arthur said: "It took me so much effort to understand it." This profound discovery made him lose any hope of finding a general and conclusive theory of the problem of human reproduction.He began to see the problem of reproduction as part of a self-coherent form formed under certain social conventions, myths, and moral conventions.Moreover, each culture has different characteristic forms. "You can measure things like income and fertility in one country, and find in another country that you have cultures that measure in the same way and cultures that don't measure in the same way at all. They're different idiosyncratic forms of ’” All things are intertwined, and no mystery can be solved without the other factors.The number of children and the composition of society are interrelated, and the way society is composed also has a great relationship with the number of children that families in this society have. unique form.This leap in Arthur's understanding led him to discover that the idea of ​​a proper form resonated with something in his mind.All his life he has been strongly seduced by a particular form.On planes, given his choice, he always takes the window seat, from which he can see the ever-changing view of the plane below.Wherever he was, he always saw the same things: stones, dirt, ice, clouds, and so on.These things combine to form a distinctive landscape that may stretch on for half an hour. "So I asked myself a question: Why is there such a peculiar form of landform? Why is there a peculiar landscape of stone shapes and meandering rivers, and half an hour later there is a completely different one. Terrain?" But now all he could see were idiosyncratic forms.For example, in 1977, he left the Population Commission and went to a US-Soviet think tank called the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA).This institution was created by Brezhnev and Nixon as a symbol of détente.Located in a small village ten miles from Vienna, the Institute is a magnificent "hunting residence" in the eighteenth-century architectural style of Maria Theresa of Luxembourg.Arthur quickly figured out that it was just a stone's throw from the ski slopes of the Tyrole Alps. "What struck me was that if you go into the villages in the Alps there, you'll see those terracotta-style roofs, balustrades and balconies that are ornate, with the characteristic asphalt on the roofs. The characteristic triangular vaults and the characteristic venetian blinds on the windows. But instead of seeing this as a beautiful picture of a collage toy, I see that no part of the village is purposeless , there is no part that is not related to other parts. The asphalt is painted on the roof to store a proper amount of snow on the roof in winter to insulate the severe cold. The rafters of the triangular roof extending from the balcony are used to prevent snow from falling on the balcony. So I’ve looked at these villages with interest and thought to myself, this part is made this way for this purpose, that part is made that way for that purpose, and all these parts are interconnected.” What struck him equally, he said, was that when he crossed the Italian border to this side of the Dolomic Alps, the style of the villages was anything but Terran.There's nothing you can point to that you've seen in Terra Ridge.Just because of countless changes in details, a completely different whole is formed.Villagers in Italy, however, face essentially the same snowfall problem as villagers in Austria. "How many times have I thought that two different cultures have produced two distinct, yet self-coherent, idiosyncratic forms."