Wresting the Economic Debate Away from the Economists
David Brooks wondered in his New York Times column last week if economists shouldn’t try to become more like historians. That was interesting to read, given that I had just spent time with a bunch of historians (and a few other humanities professors) who were wondering how they could become more like economists.
The occasion was a conference at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School on Reputation, Emotion and the Market. I was there to speak about my book on the history of financial theory, but ended up mainly engaged in a long discussion with the 30-or-so historians (and a smattering of scholars from other humanities disciplines) on hand about why economists had gained so much influence over the past half century and historians had lost so much.
One answer I offered was that economists had managed a remarkable balancing act between making the guts of their work totally incomprehensible — and thus forbiddingly impressive — to the outside world while continuing to offer reasonably straightforward conclusions. The basic form of an academic economics paper is a couple of comprehensible paragraphs at the beginning and a couple of comprehensible paragraphs at the end, with a bunch of really-hard-to-follow math or statistical analysis in the middle. An academic history paper, on the other hand, is often an uninterrupted cascade of semi-comprehensible jargon that neither impresses a lay reader nor offers any clear conclusions.
The one economist in the audience had another suggestion. Most economic work was aimed at prediction, and the world is always hungry for predictions. He added that most macroeconomic predictions are worthless (he was a microeconomist), but that doesn’t seem to have damped the demand for them.
After the conference, at dinner, I heard another explanation from the historians themselves. It’s that, especially in the U.S., only the tiniest minority of academic historians concern themselves anymore with matters of economic policy (or diplomacy, or war, or politics in the big-picture sense). The discipline has moved mostly to the study of identity (gender, race, etc.) and culture, ceding territory to the economists and political scientists. Yeah, yeah, there’s always Niall Ferguson. But he’s more the exception that proves the rule — not to mention, in the view of academic historians, a pop-culture figure who is no longer really one of them.
In this vein, it’s telling that the work of economic history Brooks cites as an example of the way forward, This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, is the work of a couple of well-credentialed economists, not historians. It also seems significant that the least-embattled-sounding historians at the Oxford conference were the ones who teach at a business school (Oxford’s Saïd School in this case, although Harvard Business School is another B-school haven for historians).
Why does any of this matter? Mainly because the ways in which scholars interpret the world can (with a time lag and a lot lost in translation) have a big influence on the way the rest of us see things. Over the past half century, economists have come to utterly dominate thinking about economic matters, and begun to insinuate themselves into lots of other fields too. Business education, and business advice, has certainly become much more economics-oriented. Which isn’t all bad. But even an economist would agree that we could use more competition in the marketplace of ideas. Right?
Wresting the Economic Debate Away from the Economists
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