Chapter 3. Elegant but Not Helpful to Navigation: Social Sciences Research and the Free Trade Debate*

“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before,” Bokonon tells us. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.– Kurt Vonnegut From time to time, major issues of public interest provide an opportunity for social scientists to unpack their gear and show what new insights their “outillage mental” can generate and what new solutions their analyses suggest for tackling ur...