Munger on Multidisciplinary Thinking, Part 4

In the first three parts of our series on legendary investor Charlie Munger's thoughts on multidisciplinary thinking (part of a speech he gave at a Harvard Law School reunion in 1998), we looked at why professionals need to think beyond their own disciplines, why traditional education often fails to teach them how to do so, and what a better multidisciplinary education could look like.

Munger's argument was that broadscale problems require knowledge from different fields, but simply having access to ideas from different disciplines is not enough. Those ideas need to be understood, connected and applied properly.

This brings us to the fourth question in Munger's 1998 Harvard Law School reunion speech: “In the last fifty years, how far has elite academia progressed toward attainable best-form multidisciplinarity?” The answer is mixed.

In the last fifty years, how far has elite academia progressed toward attainable best-form multidisciplinarity?

Munger's answer is that academia has made progress. Disciplines have increasingly borrowed useful ideas from one another, helping to reduce the problems caused by narrow, unidisciplinary thinking. But he also warns that simply taking ideas from another field does not guarantee better thinking.

• Ideas can travel: Munger points to several examples of useful intellectual borrowing and ideas travelling between disciplines. Law schools incorporated ideas from negotiation, economics, and game theory. Economics adopted the “tragedy of the commons” model from biology and began drawing on psychology through behavioural economics. These examples show how disciplines can expand their understanding by incorporating useful ideas from outside their traditional boundaries.
• Assimilate, but proceed carefully: Munger describes this approach as “take what you wish” — allowing a discipline to assimilate whatever it finds useful from another field. He believes this helped reduce the “man-with-a-hammer” tendency which reduces every problem to one kind of solution, but warns that it also produced some poor results. Ideas can be borrowed without being properly understood, and useful concepts can be mixed with ideas that are less sound simply because they come from another discipline.
• Borrow ideas systematically: Munger's deeper criticism is that academic borrowing often lacks structure and organisation. Ideas may be adopted without the right attribution, sometimes given new names, and without enough attention to which ideas are more fundamental. He argues that multidisciplinary thinking works better when ideas are properly understood, attributed, and organised according to their fundamental importance.

Munger sees progress towards multidisciplinarity, but not a complete solution to the problem. Academia has become more open to ideas crossing disciplines, but the process of borrowing itself needs to be more disciplined.

The heart of the lesson…

Munger's fourth question is less about whether academia has become more multidisciplinary and more about how far and how well it has learned to use ideas from different disciplines. He acknowledges that the boundaries between subjects have become more porous, with useful concepts moving between fields. But multidisciplinary thinking is not simply about collecting ideas from everywhere. Ideas can be borrowed badly as well. Without attribution, the right understanding, and a sense of which ideas are fundamental, cross-disciplinary borrowing can actually lead to intellectual confusion. The goal is not just to make knowledge more interconnected, but to make those connections useful, organised, and intellectually sound.