Harvey Mansfield

Tyler Cowen suspects that Harvey Mansfield doesn't like economists. He points us to:

The Volokh Conspiracy - - : On Economists: Harvey Mansfield, writing in this month's New Criterion:

The building where I used to work was shared with economists, who, living the sort of life they describe, had no incentive to flush and sometimes failed to do so.

Don't feel sad, Tyler. Harvey Mansfield appears to like few people. Consider what Harvey Mansfield is supposed to have advised one professor visiting Harvard:

Keep your door closed. If you don't, undergraduates may wander in.

I think we're in pretty good company.

Comments

[kevin quinn]

"The building where I used to work was shared with economists, who, living the sort of life they describe, had no incentive to flush and sometimes failed to do so." Apart from its 'manly' source, this comment does raise an issue for we ECON, no? When I explain to my students why, according to economists, people are less likely to tip on the interstate, they are incredulous. Would you be happy telling Mansfield that living the sort of life we describe would not be inconsistent with flushing, given that we will be repeat visitors during the day and so internalize some of the externalities imposed on later users, who may with some probability be us? I notice that bathrooms on the ground floor of my building, patronized by students, are less likely to have their toilets flushed than bathrooms on the upper floors, where we have our offices. Is it the probability of revisiting that explains the difference, since students are off to other builings etc, or is it simply that students tend to be less socialized. Do you economists fail to tip on the highway? Not me. So why do we describe people acting in ways that don't apply to ourselves? Hasn't this ever bothered you?

[Richard Green]

Sometimes I think he is just trying to be satiric. In any event, he still gave some of the best lectures I have ever heard.

[kid bitzer]

Man, if he thinks that's bad.

the building where I used to work was shared with Straussians, who thinking the kind of thoughts they do, had no incentive to flush....

[Gene O'Grady]

I would have that a building with economists in it would have switched to flushometers. They really do save money, if you're not interested in saving resources also.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/books/review/19kirn.html?ex=1300424400&en=d908539ffb147633&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

March 19, 2006

Who's the Man?
By WALTER KIRN

REMEMBER those great old "Saturday Night Live" bits about the moronic Germanic bodybuilders who kept offering to "pump you up" while flexing the delts of their bulbous foam rubber muscle suits? Remember how unwittingly fey they seemed, partly because of their wagging little pinheads but mostly because of the way they loved the words "girly" and "manly" — a pair of usages that was poignantly out of date by then among even minimally hip Americans? Remember that?

Apparently, Harvey C. Mansfield doesn't. In fact, this Harvard professor of government and the author of "Manliness" (yep), a new polemic about the nature and value of masculinity, shows little awareness of much that's happened recently — televisually and otherwise — in the allegedly feminized culture that he aims to shake up. Like Austin Powers (who, come to think of it, made even more fun of "manly" than Hans and Franz), Mansfield seems stuck in a semantic time warp in which it is still possible to write sentences like "Though it's clear that women can be manly, it's just as clear that they are not as manly or as often manly as men." A time warp where it's further possible — in a passage on the sexes' characteristic senses of humor — to cite an event from over 40 years ago as his one and only illustration of feminine wit. I'll quote it at length because Mansfield likes to write at length (and in a pipe-smokey academic baritone that I for one thought had vanished from this planet).

"But I cannot accept that they never make jokes. Women excel in put-downs. . . . During the trial over the Profumo scandal in Britain in 1963, counsel asked Mandy Rice-Davies, a witness to prostitution, whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied any impropriety in his relationship with her. Her answer: 'Well he would, wouldn't he?' It's a put-down joke, reactive to male bluster, even equipped with an ironic tag question."

In just which far-off galaxy has Mansfield set up his telescope to scrutinize the doings of us earthlings? Or, if he dwells among us, when was the last time he left the faculty club? Let's put these mysteries aside, though — as well as the puzzle of how a writer can purport to analyze human humor (even flat-footedly and badly) while remaining personally immune to it — and move on to the essence of Mansfield's argument, to the hot sweaty groin of it, the manly crux.

"Manliness" starts in a fussy lecture-hall mode with Mansfield taking the wordy, long way around to prove a few points about the male and female — that they're innately different, and in exactly the ways people always thought they were before they did any thinking on the subject. He may as well just pound the table, since those who don't agree with him already won't have their minds changed by the case he makes (which largely consists of reassuring us that the case has been made by others). "Our science," Mansfield writes (slyly suggesting with a possessive adjective that he is, indeed, a fellow Homo sapiens) "rather clumsily confirms the stereotypes about manliness. . . . But we already knew before science told us that men are more aggressive than women: is there also something to be learned in this fact?" ...

[anne]

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/opinion/05dowd.html

April 5, 2006

Two Worn-Out Diplomats, One Fold-Out Bed
By MAUREEN DOWD

I'm just back from London, where the Brits were fascinated with the Condi Rice and Jack Straw two-for-the-road odyssey, the exchange of visits to their hometowns, Birmingham and Blackburn, and the rebuff of Condi by Paul McCartney and a Blackburn mosque.

British journalists loved hearing about how Condi exercises alongside diplomatic reporters in hotel gyms, not at all self-conscious about working out in form-fitting shorts and T-shirts.

The British are used to iron ladies, perhaps not pumping iron but trying to iron out world affairs. In his quaint new book, "Manliness," the Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield cites only one woman with that exalted trait: Margaret Thatcher, who told the first President Bush not to go wobbly on Saddam. Teaching other women to be assertive, Mr. Mansfield frets, might be "like teaching a cat to bark."

The struggles of the relentless American diplomat and the charming British diplomat to knock heads in Iraq and get the government to govern, with the war spinning into sulfurous sectarian fighting, was less mesmerizing to many reporters than the pair's gender-benders.

At one point Mr. Straw said America and England had the right to prod Iraqi politicians: "We've got to be able to deal with Mr. A, Mr. B or Mr. C. We can't deal with Mr. Nobody."

A smiling Ms. Rice, still promoting the illusion that Iraqi women are better off, corrected: "Jack, I'm sure we'd be all right with Miss A or Miss B or Miss C, too, right?" (It would have to be a generic Miss, since there are no powerful women leaders there.)

The foreign secretary held his face and pleaded: "I was not being gender-specific. Don't report me, please." ...

[Ginger Yellow]

The NYRB review of 'Manliness' is one of the most devastating critiques I've ever read. Stuck in a timewarp doesn't even begin to describe it. He takes wrongheadedness to whole new levels. Brad, I think you can safely class all women and "unmanly" men economists along with undergraduates and economists as objects of his distaste.

[andres]

"I think we're in pretty good company."

*Snort*. Speak for yourself. It's bad enough to be a wine-sipping, Trader Joe-shopping, resource-hogging Californian with an average income far higher than the rest of the nation. And then you have to compound that by being an _economist_.

I wonder if its true, or just an urban legend, that students who take microeconomics classes are more likely to make non-cooperative choices (eg defection in a Prisoners' Dilemma) in game-theoretic type situations. Ladies, if you marry economists (and for some strange reason most of them _are_ men), make sure you housetrain them properly. ;-)