Superiority of economists?

 

It just so happens I’m teaching Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job this week.

The film is, not surprisingly, mentioned in “The Superiority of Economists,” the recent paper by Marion Fourcade, Etienne Ollion, and Yann Algain [pdf]. Their basic idea is that economics occupies a dominant position among the social sciences in the United States, as measured by its relative insularity, which is created and reproduced by its hierarchical structure as well as economists’ higher pay (especially as business schools have grown), individualist worldviews, and arrogance in presuming to be able to solve the world’s problems.

When we refer to the “superiority of economists,” our double entendre has both a descriptive and an explanatory purpose. Economics occupies a unique position in the academic field: far-reaching scientific claims linked to the use of formal methods; the tight management of the discipline from the top down; high market demand for services, particularly from powerful and wealthy parties; high compensation. This position of social superiority also breeds self-confidence, allowing the discipline to retain its relative epistemological insularity over time and fueling a natural inclination towards a sense of entitlement. While the imperialistic expansion of economics into aspects of social science that were traditionally outside the economic canon has spurred some engagement with non-economics scholarship, the pattern of exchange remains strongly asymmetrical, causing resentment and hostility in return. And while economists’ unique position gives them unusual power to accomplish changes in the world, it also exposes them more to conflicts of interest, critique, and mockery when things go wrong.

The paper is well worth a full read. I only have two real complaints: First, the authors refer to economists as if we were all doing the same thing. Readers will get no sense from their analysis that economists use many different theories and approaches—that economics is an agonistic field constituted by multiple, contending discourses—and that the practitioners of some theories and approaches grant themselves (and are granted by others) privileged status within the discipline. In that sense, what the authors are referring to is not the superiority of economists in general but the superiority of a particular group of mainstream—especially neoclassical—economists.

My second complaint concerns the current status of mainstream economists. Why is it that the same group of economists who got us into this mess in the first place—who produced the models and suggested the policies that created the conditions for the crises that broke out in 2007-08—still remain on top, as if those crises had never occurred? Why is it, in addition, that the teaching of economics—centered as it is on the mainstream theories that contained not even a hint that severe and far-reaching crises might break out, and had little to suggest by way of solutions when they did—has barely changed in the intervening years?

In order to answer those questions, we need to understand the superiority of mainstream economists as the result of an inside job—not only inside the discipline but also inside the current “winner-take-all” economic and social system mainstream economists are so committed to celebrating and serving.