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Book Reviews 493 My instinct is that most academic economists University Press, 2007. Pp. x, 270. $85.00, would, as I did, find this book somewhat frus- cloth; $29.99, paper. ISBN 978–0–521– trating. I agree with the premise that economists 86081–9, cloth; 978–0–521–67798–1, pbk. are having more influence than ever, but I con- JEL 2008–0029 tinually felt as I read the book that Mr. Skousen had missed many of the best and most exciting For the past thirty years, Nancy Cartwright has examples of this. Within my field—economic been one of the most significant philosophers of development—a natural thing to discuss is the science. Beginning with a focus on physics, she move toward randomized evaluations and work was at the forefront of the movement to use phi- with NGOs in developing countries to solve on- losophy to help to understand the practices of the-ground problems like high levels of intestinal physics as seen from the working physicists’ point worms and teacher absence. Economists have of view rather than simply to pronounce on those started working in-house at tech firms—Google, practices from an Olympian, but perhaps irrel- Yahoo, Microsoft—and, although Mr. Skousen evant, perspective. Starting with her Nature’s discusses the Google IPO auction, he does not go Capacities and Their Measurement (1989), she into any detail about the role economists are play- has steadily taken in a wider scope of sciences, ing more generally in these firms. including social sciences. Having said this, I’ll emphasize again that aca- In Cartwright’s view, economics is not some demics are not the intended audience and I think poor stepchild to physics but a significant part of the book fares much better in its intended area— a complex world in which the sciences are not (as as an entertaining tour through the current state so often thought by philosophers, physical scien- of economist’s involvement in the real world. After tists, and economists alike) arranged in a clear having read this book, one could have a reasonable hierarchy in which each of the “special” sciences sense of at least something that is going on in any is reducible to the more basic sciences—physics of a number of fields of economics—finance, devel- forming the bedrock. Cartwright has also been opment, health, behavioral economics, macro- a major player in the philosophical analysis of forecasting, etc. I still feel the book could have causation, a role that suits her turn toward eco- used more focus and, in the end, I am not sure that nomics, which has been undergoing a causal it really found its footing. Is this a book about the revival in, for example, the work of Granger in value of libertarian principles in economic situa- time-series econometrics, Heckman in micro- tions? Is it a book about how economists are tack- economic policy analysis, and the program of ling applied problems? Is it a book about how to natural experiments in applied microeconomics. invest your money? The truth is that it seems to be Given this background, a new book by Nancy a book about all of these questions and more, and Cartwright—particularly one that singles out no one question gets a totally complete answer. In economics in its subtitle—is surely a welcome the end, though, perhaps this is what differenti- event. ates a successful popular book from the academic Hunting Causes and Using Them unfortu- papers on which it is based. Most people do not nately represents a missed opportunity. It is not want to read the Journal of Political Economy on a systematic treatise but a compilation of occa- the beach, but they just might want to read this. sional papers written with various particular— Emily Oster and mainly philosophical—targets in view. The University of Chicago papers have been too lightly edited to form coherent chapters in a unified volume. They are B History of Economic Thought, frequently repetitive and notation shifts from Methodology, and Heterodox chapter to chapter. It is often difficult to appre- Approaches ciate fully the point of the chapter without the full context of the debates to which they origi- Hunting Causes and Using Them: Approaches nally contributed. They are heavy sledding for in Philosophy and Economics. By Nancy Cart- an economist not already immersed in those wright. Cambridge and New York: Cam bridge debates. 494 Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. XLVII (June 2009) Despite professing to seeing useful insights that frequently make their advocates allies rather in various approaches, Cartwright’s method is than opponents. more critical than constructive. And she some- The second theme is her distinction between times misunderstands the approaches that she schemes that deductively clinch causal inferences criticizes. For example, I do not recognize my and those that inductively vouch for them. Her own position in her account of my analysis of idea is that certain schemes of causal inference causal order (chapter 14). She attributes causal work by making such strong background assump- judgments to me that straightforward applica- tions that inductive arguments are turned into tion of the formal definitions of chapter 3 of my deductive arguments. She is surely right that Causality in Macroeconomics (2001) contradict. many arguments take the form of clinchers, con- This is unfortunate, as she is a deeply insight- ditional on background assumptions. But she is ful philosopher with a rare connection to actual wrong to imply that advocates of these forms of practice and, even here, her discussion is full of argument are insensitive to the tentativeness and genuine insights about causation and the prob- the fallibility of those strong background assump- lems of modeling it. A constructive treatise that tions. Such sensitivity means that arguments that tempered her criticism with a lucid exposition of take the form of clinchers are, in reality, always its objects would have been exceedingly helpful. practically vouchers. Three themes dominate Hunting Causes. The For example, with Bayes-net approaches a sta- first is that cause is a plural concept. The meth- tistical model describes data from which prob- ods and metaphysics of causation, she believes, abilities are inferred; and causal order, in turn, are context dependent. Different causal accounts is inferred deductively from those probabilities. seem to be at odds with one another only because The inferences are based on strong assumptions. the same word means different things in different For instance, analysts frequently assume causal contexts. Every formal approach to causality uses sufficiency (i.e., there are no omitted variables a conceptual framework that is “thinner” than of a type that would confuse causal inference), causal reality. She lists a bewildering variety of the acylicality of causal structure, and the lin- approaches to causation: probabilistic and Bayes- earity of functional relationships. Serious users net accounts (of, for example, Patrick Suppes, of Bayes-net approaches are deeply aware of the Clive Granger, Wolfgang Spohn, Judea Pearl, fragility of the statistics—both the quality of the Clark Glymour); modularity accounts (Pearl, data and the modeling assumptions (e.g., station- James Woodward, Stephen LeRoy); invariance arity and homogeneity). And they are aware that accounts (Woodward, David Hendry, Kevin the assumptions about causal structure may fail Hoover); natural experiments (Herbert Simon, in practical cases, which is why they have inves- James Hamilton, Cartwright); causal process tigated the implications of alternative assump- accounts (Wesley Salmon, Philip Dowe); effi- tions—e.g., latent variables (relaxing causal cacy accounts (Hoover); counterfactual accounts sufficiency), nonlinearity, and cyclical models. (David Lewis, Hendry, Paul Holland, Donald And what is the alternative? Absent the strat- Rubin); manipulationist accounts (Peter Menzies, egy of embedding clinchers within maintained, Huw Price); and others. The lists of advocates of but criticizable, assumptions, Cartwright pro- various accounts overlap. Nevertheless, she some- vides no account of how evidence vouches for times treats these accounts as if they were so dif- causal claims. ferent that it is not clear why they should be the The final theme is the distinction between subject of a single book. And she fails to explain hunting and using causes highlighted in the title. what they have in common. If, as she apparently The distinction gets its bite in Cartwright’s belief believes, they do not have a common essence, that the strategies that successfully allow the do they have a Wittgensteinian family resem- identification of casual mechanisms frequently blance? She fails to explore in any systematic serve policy applications ill. Building on a long- way the complementarities among the different standing theme of her work, real world processes approaches—for example, between invariance are seen as the complex composition of a variety accounts, Bayes nets, and natural experiments— of deeper tendencies. The function of scientific Book Reviews 495 experiments is to isolate those tendencies through Nancy Cartwright has once again written an stringent controls so that they can be exhibited intellectually challenging book, full of insights. in pure form. The application of scientific knowl- It is too bad that the presentation is not well edge in practice is frequently complicated—if adapted to an audience of econometricians and not thwarted altogether—because the real world applied economists, for whom the issues that she is open and, unlike in the laboratory, the compli- considers are important and not always clearly cating tendencies are uncontrolled. In such cases, thought through. it is not necessarily reliable to infer that effects References found under stringent controls will play out simi- larly in the world. Cartwright, Nancy. 1989. Nature’s Capacities and Their Measurement. Oxford and New York: Oxford Her insight trades on the old distinction University Press.

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