“IF ECONOMISTS could manage to get themselves thought of as humble,
competent people, on a level with dentists, that would be splendid!”
said John Maynard Keynes, a British economist. Despite their collective
failure to predict the financial crisis, let alone follow Keynes’s
injunction, economists are still very influential. They write newspaper
columns, advise politicians and offer expensive consulting services to
business-folk far more than other academics. A new paper* tries to
explain why.
One reason, say the authors, is that economists have come to believe
that they are superior. A survey in 1985 found that just 9% of graduate
students in economics at Harvard strongly believed that economics was
“the most scientific of the social sciences”. But as economics became
ever more mathematical, its practitioners grew in self-confidence. By
2003 54% of the graduate economists studying at Harvard strongly agreed
with the statement. A glance at a popular blog for doctoral students in
economics, econjobrumors.com, gives a taste of the contempt in which its
users hold other disciplines. Sociologists “play around with big
important ideas without too much effort or rigour,” one econo-nerd
asserts.
The authors point out that economists demonstrate their self-belief in subtler ways too. Articles in the American Economic Review cite the top 25 political-science journals one-fifth as often as the articles in the American Political Science Review
cite the top 25 economics journals. Another study found that American
economics professors were less likely than their peers in other subjects
to agree with the notion that “interdisciplinary knowledge is better
than knowledge obtained by a single discipline.”
The odd thing, the authors argue, is that we believe in economists
almost as much as they believe in themselves. Journalists and
politicians seek strong arguments and clear answers. Most academics are
reticent types: historians, for instance, question whether you can learn
anything from history. “For a moderate fee,” jokes Deirdre McCloskey,
an economic historian, “an economist will tell you with all the
confidence of a witch doctor that interest rates will rise 56 basis
points next month or that dropping agricultural subsidies will increase
Swiss national income by 14.8%.”
* “The superiority of economists”, by M. Fourcade, E. Ollion and Y. Algan, MaxPo Discussion Paper 14/3.
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