Alkahest my heroes have always died at the end

March 22, 2008

Beat up the economists

Filed under: Social — cec @ 1:19 pm

It’s apparently “beat up the economists” week and no one thought to tell me in advance.  Over at Crooked Timber, Daniel Davies posts about Greg Mankiw’s recent NY Times editorial and suggests that the reason economists are so patronizing is bitterness over being stuck in a low paying academic job whose sole purpose is to justify the inequities in a capitalist system.

In Scientific American, we have Rober Nadeau’s editorial on the problems with the views of economists.  Nadeau notes that economics is a social science that tried to pattern itself after physics.  Unfortunately, a) it used 19th century physics and never updated itself as the physics changed; and b) economists never realized that they can’t treat people as elemental particles.  Nadeau goes on to note some of the basic assumptions made in economics that don’t stand up.

In the interests of piling on, I’ll say that I agree with Nadeau, but think that he doesn’t go far enough.  Social sciences are extremely valuable and in a certain sense are much more difficult than the so-called hard sciences like physics and chemistry.  People don’t behave the same way, you can’t always re-run an experiment, etc., etc.  However, in the academic world, the hard sciences have been able to claim greater status because they are more rigorous and because, in essence, they are simpler.   So it’s not surprising that economists would want to claim the status of hard, reductionist, sciences.  However, it’s worse than that.  We expect physicists to explain the world.  We expect economists to make predictions and tell us how to fix things.  We’ve taken them out of the role of reductionist explainers and put them into the role of designers.

In other words, economists are social scientists with physics envy who are called upon to do the work of engineers.  It’s amazing the economy isn’t in worse shape than it is.  🙂

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