Break Up Big Econ: The economics profession has
become insular and status-obsessed, and not focused enough on making a positive
impact on the world.
Harvard’s David Deming:
Economics has long chafed at its association with
“soft” fields such as philosophy and history and thus spent most of the 20th
century trying to imitate the hard sciences by becoming more mathematically
rigorous. But this attempt didn’t work, because trying to explain the world via
mathematical models is still fundamentally interpretive, requiring crucial
assumptions about which factors belong in one’s formula at all. The shift
instead plunged economics even deeper into esoteric theorizing and insider jargon.
The problem isn’t the use of math itself. Abstruse
mathematics can lead to immense real-world benefits; the theoretical
improvements in auction design by the Nobel laureates Paul Milgrom and Robert
Wilson, for example, ended up saving the Federal Communications Commission and
taxpayers billions of dollars. The problem is that examples like that one are
not as common as they ought to be. In economics, professional incentives too
often reward theoretical elegance over solving real-world problems.
Is economics in need of trustbusting?
https://www.ft.com/content/d973dc8c-b1a1-4dd1-bd4e-be6225494ded
FT:
But what if the concentrated business is economists themselves? A study documents a “high and rising” concentration of Nobel Prize winners in a handful of top US universities: more than half their combined career time has been spent at just eight economics departments. Equivalent measures for other disciplines, from natural sciences to the humanities, are going the other way.
There are other signs of economics turning into an elite closed shop: the handful of journals acting as gatekeepers to career advancement are largely controlled by economists from the same top departments, who also disproportionately pass through the revolving doors into policymaking jobs.
https://www.ft.com/content/d973dc8c-b1a1-4dd1-bd4e-be6225494ded
FT:
But what if the concentrated business is economists themselves? A study documents a “high and rising” concentration of Nobel Prize winners in a handful of top US universities: more than half their combined career time has been spent at just eight economics departments. Equivalent measures for other disciplines, from natural sciences to the humanities, are going the other way.
There are other signs of economics turning into an elite closed shop: the handful of journals acting as gatekeepers to career advancement are largely controlled by economists from the same top departments, who also disproportionately pass through the revolving doors into policymaking jobs.
High and Rising Institutional Concentration of Award-Winning Economists