The latest in economics exceptionalism

Joseph Delaney writes:

Is it fair to quote the definition of economics from the blurb for a book? If so, consider this definition in the blurb for Emily Oster’s new book:

When Oster was expecting her first child, she felt powerless to make the right decisions for her pregnancy. How doctors think and what patients need are two very different things. So Oster drew on her own experience and went in search of the real facts about pregnancy using an economist’s tools. Economics is not just a study of finance. It’s the science of determining value and making informed decisions. To make a good decision, you need to understand the information available to you and to know what it means to you as an individual.

So, when applied to a medical topic (like pregnancy) how does this differ from evidence based medicine? Should I be calling myself an economist?

None of this mean that Emily shouldn’t write this book. My own read on the alcohol and pregnancy angle is that the current advice does seem to be based on an excess of caution. But it seems odd to argue that being an economist is the key piece here. Jumping fields is fine and can often lead to amazing insights, but maybe we should call this shifting of fields what it is rather than expanding the definition of economics to make it less meaningful?

Indeed. The above quote is a step above “Thinking like an economist simply means that you scientifically approach human social behavior. . . .” or that economists “believe circumstances, not culture, drive people’s decisions,” but it still reminds me of my thought from a few months ago that economics now is in the position of Freudian psychology in the 1950s:

Back then, Freudian psychiatrists were on the top of the world. Not only were they well paid, well respected, and secure in their theoretical foundations, they were also at the center of many important conversations. Even those people who disagreed with them felt the need to explain why the Freudians were wrong. Freudian ideas were essential, leaders in that field were national authorities, and students of Freudian theory and methods could feel that they were initiates in a grand tradition, a priesthood if you will. Freudians felt that, unlike just about everybody else, they treated human beings scientifically and dispassionately. What’s more, Freudians prided themselves on their boldness, their willingness to go beyond taboos to get to the essential truths of human nature. Sound familiar?

Not all economists have this attitude, but I think even the economists with more reasonable interdisciplinary understanding benefit (and suffer from) the prominence of their field. Just as with Freudian psychiatrists in the 1950s, they’re at the top of the prestige scale, they’re showered with money, and they’re at the center of all sorts of national and international discussions. Like it or not, we all have to deal with them, and they have to deal with each other. Which is why you have an economist publishing a book on evidence-based medicine.

Just as the 1950s must have been an exciting time to be a Freudian, the 2000s must be an exciting time to be an economist.

P.S. Just to clarify: I’m not saying that economics is just like Freudian psychiatry in the 1950s, I’m just saying that the social position of the two fields is the same. As with Freudian psychiatrists in the 1950s, economists today are celebrated in the media, they are treated as authorities in all subjects, and they get paid well. To make these observations is not to say that the current high status of economics is inappropriate (or, for that matter, to say that the high status of Freudian psychiatry was inappropriate in the 1950s). I’m not making a statement about the validity of economics or the quality of the work in health economics; I’m making a (qualitative) sociological observation about the position of economics and economists in our public discourse.

P.P.S. Perhaps I should replace all instances of “economics” above with “microeconomics” or, better still, “pop-microeconomics.” On the other hand, just about all mainstream economists benefit from the rising tide of the prestige of the economics profession. Even if all you do is policy analysis or macro forecasting, and even if you cringe at statements such as Oster’s quoted above, you still get the benefits of the economics label. (And, as with psychiatry, these benefits are not entirely unearned. Our society certainly has a need for economics (both micro and macro) just as it has a need for psychiatry, and we can’t blame the practitioners in these fields if they can’t deliver everything that some promoters are promising.)

56 thoughts on “The latest in economics exceptionalism

  1. I am one of many (applied) economists that read your blog regularly. In addition, I feel that I have a lot to learn from you and own and am reading one of your textbooks. But the tone of this post is rather divisive. Not all of us fit your stereotype and the economist mentioned was certainly strongly promoted by her advisers, mentors and marginal revolution (among many other places), but has many critics among economists.

    Perhaps you are right about academic economists at top schools – but many of us are far more open minded than your post implies. I one for one hardly believe that fixed effects is the only way to handle panel data or that economists understand medicine or development better than others.

    Tone down the rhetoric and stick to writing about “Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference and Social Science”.

    • If Hal Varian is right about statisticians being the next sexy occupation, in 5 years you will see posts by non-statisticians complaining that statistician exceptionalism.

    • Andrew isn’t alone here though: I’ve heard increasing criticism of economic studies that jump into a field, rehash what has been known in the field for years, coach it in economics jargon and try to sell it as novel findings.

      Admittedly, a large part of the blame rests on gullible media that after Freakonomics will lap up every non-traditional Economist’s words unquestionably as gospel truth.

      A little introspection in the profession wouldn’t do harm.

    • Economist says:

      “But the tone of this post is rather divisive. … Tone down the rhetoric and stick to writing about “Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference and Social Science”.

      Yes, sir! Right away, sir!

      • Andrew, first, the tone of your post is grating.

        Second, economics is an important part of evidence-based medicine, not something distinct from evidence-based medicine. So, yes, economists can and very commonly do “do” research in evidence-based medicine (for example, the Journal of Health Economics is highly cited in the medical literature). Narrowly, variants of cost-utility analysis are a critical component of evaluation. Broadly, health economics meshes with other approaches, it’s part of and consilient with the broader literature, not some other kind of animal.

        Third, comparing all of economics to Freudian psychology implies that all of economics is just as useless as that defunct approach, and that’s a cheap shot. If I take your paragraph and substitute, say, “Bayesian statistics” for “economics,” would you find that a compelling argument?

        Finally, taking a breathless advertising blurb intended to move copies of a pop book as representative of the beliefs of the community of economists doesn’t fly. The blurb seems about as overblown to me as it does to you. I haven’t read the book, but I would guess that the point that’s being alluded to is that economists focus on optimal tradeoffs between health and other outcomes whereas often in medicine, particularly clinical medicine, it is implicitly assumed that health alone is the relevant maximand. So Oster is going to highlight cases in which some researchers have advised against low-risk behaviors because the risk is not zero and offer instead that the benefits are worth bearing the risk. The study of optimal tradeoffs between competing goals is part of what microeconomics brings to evidence-based medicine; it’s not “jumping fields” for specialists in that area to to apply those tools in health economic applications.

        • Chris:

          1. See the P.S. added above. I hope this clarifies that I am not claiming that economics is useless (nor, for that matter, am I claiming that Freudian psychiatry is useless). I’m talking about the role of economics (and, earlier, Freudian psychiatry) in our public discourse.

          2. I object to statements such as, “Thinking like an economist simply means that you scientifically approach human social behavior.” I similarly object to statements of the form, “Bayesian inference is simply rational decision making.” I would have no problem if you criticize Bayesians for some of their over-the-top claims. Deborah Mayo criticizes fanatical Bayesians all the time and I have no problem with her doing that.

          In fact Bayesian inference does currently seem to be the rock star of statistical methods. And, as a practitioner who works in this tradition, I’ve benefited from it. But look at what I write here on this blog! I don’t go around making exaggerated claims about Bayesian methods, I don’t go around saying how special we are. Instead, I’m careful to emphasize the continuity with other approaches and I work hard to puncture overblown claims (see, for example, my paper with Cosma Shalizi).

        • Andrew, thank you for clarifying your position. On teh role of economics in popular discourse, I find the claim, particularly post-2008, that “economists today are celebrated in the media, they are treated as authorities in all subjects” very strange. Economists are routinely dismissed and scorned in the media and not even treated as authorities on economics itself, much less anything else. Saying anything about mainstream economics other than some variant on “neoliberal apologists!” or “couldn’t even forecast the crisis!” would be viewed as unseemly in large swathes of popular, and even academic, discussion.

          I agree, as I said, that the blurb on the book is overblown, and I certainly agree that the assertion that “thinking like an economist simply means that you scientifically approach human social behavior” is silly. But it’s hard to reconcile your P.S. with your claim that it’s absurd for an economist to write a book drawing on evidence-based medicine, and the animosity on display in remarks like, “like it or not, we all have to deal with them” is not exactly conducive to inter-disciplinary communication. Since none of us have actually read Oster’s book, we cannot know whether she’s overstepped her expertise, but in any case she is not representative of the community of economists.

        • @Chris:

          One way to look at it is that because economists have lost a lot of popular trust in their traditional areas of punditry (e.g. mainstream economics ) they are now trying to publish so aggressively (and often prematurely) in so many other areas.

          Time will tell how that adventure turns out.

    • I have to side more with the post-Samuelson vision of economics as a branch of decision theory. Robin Crusoe can engage in economic activity (say, deciding whether to eat or plant a crop, how much time to spend fishing vs repairing a net) without exchange. POWs who barter are engaged in economic activity even before they coordinate on something like cigarrettes as a currency. And there’s a lot of analysis of just what makes something “money”. Then there’s game theory and the mechanism design of folks like Roth. Why partition exchange for currency off by itself?

      • One could argue that the use of currency itself induces an alienation in the forms of exchange – albeit that does sound a bit Marxian, doesn’t it?

        I’m mostly thinking about classic studies of non-monetarized economies, such as Bronislaw Malinowski’s “Coral Gardens and Their Magic”. In non-monetarized economies – due to the lack of social differentiation – objects in the economy tend to have “thick context”, whereas money itself exactly is interesting, because it has almost no connotations. This is exactly what allows the cold, rational calculations of the modern man to function.

        In the two examples you mention, there is evidently economic activity, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that economics are the appropriate frame of analysis. One man in his solitude could posit belief in some spiritual being, but I doubt that the sociology of religion would be the correct way to analyse his behaviour and values. More is different.

        I consider decision theory / game theory to be a tool for economic analysis, just as statistical methods.

        • Lionel Robbins famously defined economics in 1935: “Economics is a science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.” I don’t think there’s anything in any of the so-called economic imperialism that goes beyond that fairly simple definition, including Emily Oster’s pregnancy decisions. You define the ends (utility… sorry, Andrew) you define the means, and you explore the implications of aggregating those decisions across people. No exchange required, but exchange becomes important simply because it is such an efficient way to mediate between means and ends. The imperialism simply means that the definition covers a lot of stuff. But it doesn’t cover it uniquely! Psychology studies how people think. But every decision allocating scarce resources to competing ends requires some kind of thought process. I’m inclined to side with Andrew that the prestige (and scorn) heaped on economists is a function of the attitudes of others, not really anything within economists themselves.

        • In my opinion, that definition covers the entirety (or close to) of the social sciences. Consider Max Weber’s definition of sociology as the study of purposive action. One could then argue, that the field of study of sociology and economics is the same, but they tend to view it from different angles – sociology from the angle of understanding (Verstehen), economics from the angle of decision-making … then, of course, one is left with the question of what to do with the field of economic sociology…

          In my opinion, as I tried to offer above, economics is the social-scientific study of a particular field of human endeavour. While all societies have economic functions, the field of economics study those in which these functions have formed their own subsystem. Consider art history: while all known human societies have some form of artistic expressions, I don’t think that you could, in a meaningful way, write an art history of the Azande or Trobriand Islanders, because there is no subsystem known as “art” in these societies: everything is art, and exactly because of that, nothing is art as we know it.

  2. That is something of Oster’s style. See e.g. her TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/emily_oster_flips_our_thinking_on_aids_in_africa.html

    I cringe when I hear economists talk like that, because I think the field does have a lot to offer. Non-economists learn to dismiss economists too hastily, perhaps, when a minority of its members go around “Beckering” themselves, acting like their approach has special power. Oster’s talk, for example, would be stronger without the stuff about econ being special.

    Most of the economists I talk to these days have the opposite view. They are looking outward to other fields for answers, sometimes too hastily, imo. I tend to interact with development and natural resource economists, though, and they are maybe a different breed?

  3. As a liberal, this is partly why I did Economics over History or PolySci. Economic policy is important, and quantitative skills are real skills. Another reason I did economics aside from the importance is that it’s also a very conservative field. First you’ve got the Republican right-wing, sticky-price sticky-wage denying crazies, but then on the Democratic side of the ledger there’s still this strange breed of centrist economist who is still six kinds of crazy and buys into a lot of economist-y views of the world that are wrong. E.g., Larry Summers and Peter Orzsag, goats of the Obama admin, are birds of this feather.

    But it’s really the conservative economists who are the biggest chest-thumpers, the most insular, who gravitate toward doing the complicated-looking Macro modeling with no purpose, and who are most dismissive of insights from psychology and anthropology — fields in which they are poorly read. This group of people, who make $$$ with prestigious tenured jobs at top universities from Harvard to Stanford, and push out crap research, are really something to behold. Unfortunately, with a dangerous socialist muslim in the oval office, I suspect a larger number of incoming phd students are conservative these days. Take a look a http://www.econjobrumors.com/ for a flavor of what phd econ students are junior faculty are like.

  4. @Chris Auld: Context matters in this case. The economist in question, Emily Oster, was famous for an argument that did not consider the epidemiological evidence when trying to explain sex ratios based on a distribution of Hepatitis B(http://blogs.ft.com/undercover/2008/05/emily-oster-recants/#axzz2JOtKhpGy). The focus of this work seemed to be entirely looking at non-economic data (at least insofar as you can have a distinction — you go too far with utility and all endpoints work fine).

    The quote that was annoying was “Economics is not just a study of finance. It’s the science of determining value and making informed decisions.” Had it simply been “Using her training as a scientist looking at complex problems, Dr. Oster . . . ” then I think it would have been entirely unobjectionable. I have actually pre-ordered the kindle version of the book, because I like seeing a diversity of perspectives on public health and she is a bright lady. But my comments at the time were simply a reaction to a very expansive (and generally unhelpful) definition of an economist.

    To be fair, it is possible that the publisher had a publicist do the blurb, and Dr. Oster might have had the same reaction I did when I read it.

  5. Whether this is “really Economics” is simply the wrong question. University departments like “Economics” and “Evidence Based Medicine” hardly map to a set of academic Natural Kinds, and methods seem as reasonable a delimiter as issues. Especially insofar as economics gave rise to models of individuals as rational utility optimizers, it seems reasonable to think of such models in a medicine/public health context as within the economist’s wheelhouse.

    To be sure, it’s a good day to be an economist. But the pressing question isn’t “What are all these economists doing in our field?”, it’s “What are these rational actor models doing in our field?” We should only concerned about Freudians when Freudianism isn’t the right model.

  6. I gotta say that, as an economist, I have always been leery of the tendency, which is all too common among economists, to expand the definition of economics beyong any reasonable boundary. (I found, for example, Gary Becker’s analysis of marriage choices to be somewhat underwhelmingly.) Yes, economics is about making (some) decisions, but (from my point of view) the relevant decision are those about which the decision-maker has a *very* clear idea of the *relevant* benefits and costs and, generally, in which the decision-maker is acting only for her/himself. I certainly would not want economists making decisions about (for example) the corect degree of progressivity of the tax system, for example. In the case of medical care, I’m not sure that I have either the capability of the time to do my own assessment of the potential beenefits and potential costs. I expect (and insist) that the medical personnel work with do that assessment and present me with their analysis. And then I have to make the final decision.

    In the case of a lot of decisions, of course, “benefits” and “costs” are either ill-defined, or impossible to measure, or not particularly relevant.

    And, as has been noted already, what a publisher uses as a blurb might cause the author to cringe, or throw up…

  7. You got me thinking about the Freud-influenced Hidden Persuaders and Levitt’s “hidden side of everything.” Both left the impression that one small set of theories could explain most human behavior (though Packard attitude was quite a bit different).

    • Mark:

      Yah, I hadn’t thought of that! Freudianism (or, at least, pop-Freudianism’s) insistence that we all act based on hidden motives (even if we deny it) does seem to parallel microeconomics’s (or, at least, pop-microeconomics’s) insistence that we can all be modeled as utility-maximizers (even if we deny it).

      This also connects to the pride that pop-Freudians and pop-microeconomists have in being taboo-flouting truth tellers.

      Also see P.P.S. above.

      • After reading Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking, fast and slow”, I came away with the renewed belief that utility theory was ridiculous, an opinion I formed back many years ago when in university.

        It looks like behavioural economists are addressing some of the theory problems in economics but I have read that utility theory is still being taught as if it is true.

      • Saying some behavior can be “modeled as utility maximizing” isn’t saying much, indeed, it’s perilously close to tautology.

        The substantive claim is really that it is extremely useful to model people as goal-directed, with goals specified by the researcher. Framing goal-directed behavior as a maximization problem is analytically desirable for many reasons. It’s unfortunate the objective function in that optimization problem is denoted “utility,” as that misleading jargon leads to endless confusion.

        Saying behavior is goal-directed leaves us with the problem of specifying which goals are important in any given situation. However, evidence can help us figure that out. For example, some advocates of the much-derided method of modeling voting behavior as rational claim that they can use statistical methods to help determine the goals voting preferences are defined over. Those wacky pop microeconomists!

        http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/rational_final6.pdf

  8. Comparison of economics with psychology of the 1950s does not feel fair. Granted, Freudian psychologists were wrong about many things and economists might be wrong about many things too; however, unlike Freudian psychologists economists have a coherent strategy for discovering what they are wrong about. A comparison of economists of today with physicists of the last century is more faltering and more accurate. Physicists thought that everything other than stamp collection was basically physics and they had enough intelligence, chutzpah, math skills and common sense to tackle anything of importance much like economists do today. Physicists were listened to regarding matters other than physics not just because they figured out how to blow up the world, they actually had profound things to say. It suffices to mention a few books with “modest” sounding titles like “What is Life” by Erwin Schrödinger’s and “Theory of Probability” by Harold Jeffreys, both penned by famous physicists both had profound impact on the way biologists and statisticians think about the word. Similarly economists had profound impact on legal scholarship and practice and on political science, although perhaps not as profound as physics had on neighboring fields.

    History proved that economists are almost as capable of wreaked havoc as physicists– the Maoist China, Communist Russia and North Korea are silent reminders of how powerful economic theory could be in transforming societies and ruining tens of millions of lives. Only fool would argue that economic theory is irrelevant.

    That bring me to another similarity between physics and economics. In both disciplines theory is taken extremely seriously– it is a core part of the curriculum. I believe that having a strong theoretical training is a key to encouraging the kind of “adventures thinking” that enable economists and physicists to transfer the conceptual framework of their disciplines to other disciplines. I expect the same will be increasingly happening in computer science. Linguistics is already becoming a sub field of CS and I would expect that in twenty years some history departments would start hiring CS PhDs. Ask me why if this sounds implausible.

    Economics is not the most happening science, economic advances pale in comparison with what biologists have learned about the world. Yet, biologists did not capture the spot light in a way their science deserves. I believe hostility of biology to theory is to blame. In any university one can find many courses on economic theory, theoretical physics or theoretical computer science. It is hard to find a course on theoretical biology. Biologists are not taught to think conceptually and are not encouraged to think adventurously. Until very recently it was virtually impossible to publish a theoretical paper in a biology journal. This is starting to change, system biology departments that see theoretical inquiry as legitimate are popping up. I believe that when first year biology PhD curriculum will include a theory sequence biologists will start making seminal contributions to other fields. We are safe for now from biologists invading our disciplines but I hope not for too long.

    • Michael:

      Good points. Perhaps we can break the claims of pop-microeconomists into four parts:

      1. Economists are amazing people, they think out of the box and can solve all sorts of problems using their logical, dispassionate way of looking at the world.

      2. Economics is a descriptive science. It describes how the world works, like it or not, taboos be damned.

      3. Economics is about making the world a better place, free people and free markets, if people listen to the advice of economists they will be happier and more fulfilled.

      4. The laws of economics apply to all sorts of social settings (such as interactions between family members), thus we can directly use economics to understand and solve real world problems.

      The analogy with physics works very well with item #1 and, to some extent, item #2.

      The analogy with Freudian psychology works very well with items #2,3,4.

      Neither analogy is perfect; I think each adds something to the picture.

    • The difference is that in the 20th century physicists actually did solve an enormous number of diverse problems, and practitioners of other fields were aware of those achievements.

    • A lot of economists fancy themselves to be physicists, but the relationship is different. In physics, the systems and experiments have been reduced to minimal, “simple” systems. The theory is backed and tightly follows very well-defined experiments (with a few exceptions – but in those cases even the physicists argue over the value of those subfields without empirical data).

      The comparison to biology is more apt. Both fields study systems where causal relationships are dense and have lots of feedback. The issue with extracting principles in such systems is that there’s lots of heterogeneities in your effects which are strongly context dependent. The systems are out of equilibrium a when the biggest effects are occurring and effects exhibit strong hysteresis characteristics. So even when someone claims to measure an identifiable effect through observation, interacted in a slightly different context or intervention, the “principle” doesn’t generalize. True invariants are few and far between.

      The main difference is that biologists are able to carry out controlled experiments and probe the context dependence one experiment at a time. This restricts ones ability to create fanciful unifying theories. Where you _do_ find biology arguments over theoretical, supposedly-unifying, models is where direct empirical data is poor. For example, people can get into endless debates about historical mechanisms of evolution, and this is probably where biology gets closest to economics. It’s been quoted before, but it’s relevant here again – as Feynman said, “it’s because someone knows something about it that we can’t talk about physics. It’s the things that nobody knows about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance… so it’s the subject that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about!”

      The biggest impediment to progress in biology isn’t the lack of theory, it’s the complexity of the system and the fact that field is defined as characterizing that complexity as given by nature (unlike in engineering, where complexity can be abstracted as needed).

      The worse and more limited the empirical data is, the easier it is to imagine that arguing over theories constitutes real progress and real contributions. In economics, it also seems that the “adventurous thinking” often comes from overly-simplistic explanations of the world (i.e. ignorance) rather than from mathematical equations.

    • Please do not confuse psychologists with psychiatrists; most Freudians were the latter. By the 1950’s psychology had mostly turned away from schools of theory (Structuralism, Functionalism, Behaviorism, Gestalt..). We simply found that we could maintain productive research programs (cf. Lakatos) without requiring grand, all-encompassing conceptual frameworks, and in any case we hadn’t made much progress in rejecting any of the competing candidates. I’m looking from the outside, but economics doesn’t appear to have made as much progress as you claim in rejecting theories (see John Quiggin’s latest title, Zombie Economics).

      Biology has obviously been far more productive still, as you concede. Doesn’t suggest to me that it lacks ‘adventurous thinkers’, or if it does, that that matters.

      I believe revo11 (below) is on the mark: biology (and psychology, sociology, etc.) deal with extremely complex systems with closely coupled elements and subsystems; that is the principal barrier to comprehensive theory. In fact, those subsystems likely evolved at different times for different purposes, and it is quite possible that there is no single account that is valid for all of them. Remember that for the last half-century or more, physicists have used quantum mechanics at very small scales and relativistic mechanics at very large scales, without any theoretical unification (or even harmonization, I guess) of the two.

    • The comparison with Physics isn’t fair. Economics is far more about ideology than physics is. There are very few wide chasms in Physics where divergent camps can keep debating for decades without any real resolution (Austrians vs. Keynesians etc.).

      Also, in most cases it is hard to do real experimental economics.

      • Rahul, I think you’re drawing some unwarranted inferences about research economics drawn from internet discussion. For example, there are vanishingly few Austrian economists: for instance, as far as I am aware, there are zero Austrian academic economists in Canada, among on the order of a thousand economics professors. The modal number of Austrians in departments around the world, including the U.S., is surely zero.

        Like any other active discipline, economists commonly argue with one another over what evidence means, and, yes, since we are usually limited to observational data, the evidence is often open to multiple interpretations. But the notion that economics departments of are full warring camps of researchers who can’t even decide in broad strokes on how to do economics is misleading.

        I think the analogy to evolutionary biology is apt, one difference being bitter disputes between biologists generally play out in the pages of academic journals, whereas in economics those disputes also play out in the popular media. Commonly these academic disputes on public display center on by far the most difficult, and the only area in which it even makes sense to talk of “camps” of economists—macroeconomics—and that too leads to misleading impressions over the discipline as a whole.

  9. wasn’t this niche occupied by chaos theory in the 1980s, and physicists after WWII ?
    Indeed, from an ecological perspective, there always has to be a profession that considers itself superior to all othres, and which see fit to pronounce on topics of all sorts…for individuals, this is called nobelitis; not sure what the plural is

    • Ezra:

      No, chaos theory was trendy, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Chaos theorists were not hired as presidential advisors or paid particularly well or treated as experts in the news media, nor was chaos theory in the 1980s considered an all-encompassing explanation of human behavior as was psychiatry in the 1950s or economics in the 2000s.

  10. Economists benefit from being seen as less politically correct than other social scientists, but not so politically incorrect that they get in permanent career trouble. For example, Larry Summers’ politically incorrect statements helped cost him his Harvard presidency but by 2009 he had a top job in the Obama Administration.

    • Steve:

      I’d like to say that what gives economists their status (compared to physicists, biologists, anthropologists, etc) is their close proximity to money. But that would overexplain the phenomenon. After all, economists were also connected to money in the 1950s, and they should’ve had even higher prestige than now, given that Keynesian and related ideas were credited with lifting the U.S. and Germany out of depression in the 1930s and ensuring prosperity after the war.

      But my impression is that economics as a profession was not so prestigious in the 1950s as now. Yes, there were economists in the government, but their domain of expertise was limited. It was the Freudians who were the ones perceived to have the skeleton key to human nature. (And, sure, Margaret Mead etc too, but I’d put her in the Freudian penumbra.)

      One could also consider high-middlebrow literature as another reflection of cultural influence. Again, Freudianism was central. A postwar novelist such as Updike or Roth is aware of Freudianism the way that a modern novelist such as Coe or Franzen is aware of market economics.

      One complication was that, in the 1950s, Marxism was still strong among economists. Thus, the field of economists was spit three ways, between the Marxists, the Keynesians, and the classical liberals. In the U.S., the Marxists had their niche but were certainly not in the position to be presented as impartial authorities in the manner of 1950s Freudians or modern-era mainstream economists. Galbraith was a culture hero but he was just one guy. In recent years we’ve had Greenspan, Levitt, Krugman, and dozens of less-famous but still well-respected academic economists (e.g., Alan Krueger) who are authority figures.

      Again, this may well be all appropriate. I’m being descriptive here, not normative.

      P.S. The extreme political incorrect school of anthropology today holds a position somewhat analogous to Marxists in the 1950s (although without the whole overthrowing-the-government political angle, of course): they are respected for their tenacity but on the margin of any serious mainstream discussions.

      • “high-middlebrow literature as another reflection of cultural influence. Again, Freudianism was central.”

        Right. For example, when I took Psychology 101 at Rice U. in 1977, one mandatory reading was a bestselling novel by screenwriter (“Butch Cassidy” and “Princess Bride”) William Goldman called, I think, Boys and Girls Together, about growing up sensitive and Jewish in the New York area and encountering girls (a more soap-operaish, less funny Portnoy’s Complaint … which, by the way, is addressed entirely to a Freudian shrink). Goldman’s novel was a pretty good read, but it was assigned to us because it had this giant Freudian Apparatus bolted on — who was attracted to whom was all about Oedipus complexes and toilet training and the rest. I pointed out in class that the story would make just as much good sense without all the Freudian hugger-mugger, a suggestion that was frostily received by the Psych professor.

        Everybody was under the thumb of the Freudians. I can recall C.S. Lewis showing how Christianity made sense from a Freudian viewpoint.

        And then, after awhile, you stopped hearing about Freudianism.

      • Interesting discussion.

        I have always wondered why epidemiologists (who are not MDs) end up more often in management positions in health research?

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_de_Saussure defined economics as the science of how people value things and how people value things is politically vital to understand.

        (Now de Saussure switched to linguistics after noting that if you tell people how they value things, they change how the value things. Freud also wrote (in Project for a scientific psychology?) in essence that he realized that in his lifetime no one would be able to find out what was wrong in his theory.)

  11. Another academic specialty that was huge in the 1950s was anthropology (e.g., Margaret Mead). But cultural anthropologists are considered deadly boring these days because they are so slavishly politically correct. Thus, anthropologists are always mad at interlopers like Jared Diamond who are less tedious.

  12. The blurb to the book sounded so much like this company writeup that I couldn’t resist:
    http://www.wisertogether.com/company/

    From the above link:

    WiserTogether was born out of a simple idea: technology could help people make faster and better decisions. In the fall of 2007, WiserTogether’s founder, Shub, and his wife went through a difficult pregnancy. In particular, the decision about whether to undergo invasive and expensive genetic test daunted them.

    There were plenty of sources of information: friends, family, the Internet, even academic literature (we’re talking about a pair of economists here, after all). In fact, in some ways there was too much information, or at least too much to be useful. Their friends were helpful, but the information was anecdotal. Health Web sites had good information, but were overwhelming and didn’t offer enough direction. But it was nearly impossible to feel fully comfortable with their understanding of the risks involved, and what amount of resolution the tests would provide. They had both too much and too little information—-too much to separate relevant from irrelevant, too little about their particular situation.

    What they really wanted was not just data, but the right data: What did other couples like them (in their 30s, having their first baby) do? What tests did they have? What treatments did they seek? What did doctors do when faced with the same situation themselves? And, always lurking in the background, what was covered?

    Shub and his wife had to make some of the toughest decisions of their lives with insufficient and hard to find information. And their experience was not unique. The stress of making difficult medical decisions without adequate information is extremely common. …

  13. Emily Oster is part of a small, extreme subgroup of economists who publish overblown nonsense. To name a few other names, I would include Steve Levitt, Carolyn Hoxby, and Jim Poterba (who historically has advised and promoted the people who produce this stuff). All members of this group (except grandfather Poterba himself, who is just a promoter) have been caught with papers that are so wrong that to me it is difficult to think they were not faked. This poor research is always combined with rhetoric about how smart economists are, and it always occurs in fields where economists really are not experts. To me, Emily Oster’s new book fits right in this tradition. I would not be surprised if following the advice in it is a great way to harm your unborn baby.

      • Funny you should say that…
        Drinking while pregnant is exactly one of the things where she claims to overturn medical orthodoxy. I’ve heard she made a point of drinking while pregnant in front of people and then arguing its safe. Granted she is not supporting binge drinking, but she can cause real harm if she is wrong. Given her superficial explanation of missing women caused by health problems rather than gender preference (which did not hold up in future studies, and somehow Levitt and Poterba spun her admitting she is wrong into her being a uniquely upstanding economist desrving of praise), I do sincerely worry she is playing with fire here.

  14. I think the trendy thing today is “data science,” not economics. Big data!

    As far as I can tell, economists like Emily Oster have much better data analysis skills than most research MDs, and so can actually add value with informed commentary on evidence-based medicine. I guess we need to see her book first to see if she adds value, or at the very least gives an accurate summary of what is and isn’t known. Hopefully she doesn’t pass on any of Nathan Myhrvold’s tips about increasing the albedo of your baby.

    And if she can write about an interesting topic in an accessible way, why not make a bestseller out of it? Of course, statisticians could do the same. (Or Nate Silver could do it, or one of Obama’s campaign gurus). Andrew, the only reason your next book couldn’t be a bestseller subtitled “A statistician’s take on pregnancy” has to do with the number of times you’ve been pregnant, not with the perceived status of your profession or your skill set.

    And on this bestselling book of yours, would you object to a blurb stating that “Statistics is not just a study of means and variances. It’s the science of understanding how the world really works.”? Not the words you would use to describe the field, I’m sure, but they would sound pretty reasonable and non-embarrassing to me.

    • Alex:

      Regarding big data, I don’t think the popularity of the concept has yet fully trickled down into fame and fortune for the practitioners, but, as someone who’s been a practicing statistician for awhile, I agree that our status has improved compared to what it was a couple decades ago.

      Regarding “A statistician’s take on pregnancy,” I have two Bayesian Data Analysis coauthors who know a lot more about the science of pregnancy than I do, so I think I’ll let them write that book.

      Regarding the Oster quote, I see your point, but there’s also this: “So Oster drew on her own experience and went in search of the real facts about pregnancy using an economist’s tools.” Drawing on her own experience is fine but it wouldn’t hurt for her to study the public health literature, especially given the disaster of her earlier foray into that area, where she defiantly want up against the experts and was wrong. So, yes, I suppose it was the combination of the person and the quote, not the quote alone, that did it for you.

      Finally, and most importantly: +1 for the albedo comment.

  15. Andrew, on what basis are you assuming that Oster doesn’t draw on the relevant literatures? The following paragraph on the dust jacked blurb reads:

    “Take alcohol. We all know that Americans are cautious about drinking during pregnancy. Official recommendations call for abstinence. But Oster argues that the medical research doesn’t support this; the vast majority of studies show no impact from an occasional drink. The few studies that do condemn light drinking are deeply flawed, including one in which the light drinkers were also heavy cocaine users.”

    Note “the medical research doesn’t support this,” not “Emily Oster’s unpublished novel findings don’t support this.”

    The medical literature is actually very consistent with the notion that pregnancy risks are commonly misunderstood by both practitioners and patients, and MDs over-estimating risk is an ongoing and well-documented problem. Try searching for “perceptions teratogenic risk.”

    • Chris:

      Oster’s book could indeed be excellent. All I’m going on is a second-hand report of a blurb, and some knowledge of what she’s done before. But she could well have learned from her mistakes. I like to feel that I have, and I’d hope that others can too.

      Regarding official recommendations for abstinence: I always thought this sort of thing was to provide cover for alcoholics, as it’s said for some to be easier to abstain than to drink moderately.

    • At the risk of piling yet more criticism on a poor dust cover, this quote may refute the claim that “Oster doesn’t draw on the relevant literatures,” but it seems to support the criticism that field-jumping pop economists often confidently make recommendations using overly simplistic approaches that overlook the subtleties of the data. (see Levitt on drunk driving.)

      While over-estimating risk is a real issue in medicine, there is a huge asymmetry between the potential costs of drinking too little and drinking too much during pregnancy. Add in a certain amount of variability around how much alcohol actually gets consumed (even among patients who are sincerely trying to consume a safe amount). Under those circumstances, research showing “no impact from an occasional drink” does not rule out the possibility that a cost benefit analysis wouldn’t support a general recommendation of abstinence.

  16. Mark: “field-jumping pop X’s” tend to write silly things, for any X (and if we have to choose an X as most pervasively guilty, I’d say physicists). The amount of nonsense coming from economists about fields in which they are not experts is dwarfed by the mountain of nonsense written about economics by non-economists.

    That said, I think it uncharitable at this point to claim Oster is field-jumping. Commonly, issues such as the effect of alcohol on pregnancy do not hinge on clinical expertise but rather expertise in causal inference from observational data, turning allegations of field-jumping on their head to the extent that the narrowly medical literature is authored by clinicians with little relevant methodological expertise. And there is a substantial literature in health economics on pregnancy resolutions, e.g.,

    http://www.jstor.org/action/doBasicSearch?Query=%28pregnancy+birthweight%29+AND+%28year%3A%5B1990+TO+3000%5D%29+AND+disc%3A%28economics-discipline%29&Search=Search&gw=jtx&prq=%28pregnancy+alcohol%29+AND+%28year%3A%5B1990+TO+3000%5D%29+AND+disc%3A%28economics-discipline%29&hp=25&acc=off&aori=off&wc=on&fc=off

    Possibly actually reading the book before slamming it and its author would be helpful, particularly if even the dust jacket blurb is to be misread in the worst possible light and the existence of health economics studiously ignored.

    On pregnancy and alcohol: there are two issues conflated here (by the dust jacket blurb). One is the evidence on the effect of light drinking on pregnancy outcomes, the other is the appropriate recommendation for pregnant women. It would not necessarily be inconsistent to hold both that there is no evidence that light drinking is harmful and that the only appropriate recommendation is abstinence, but such a position need not entail misrepresenting the evidence. See for example this debate in BMJ:

    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2043426/
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2043444/

    This is an issue which has been hashed out at length in the medical literature; the side Oster apparently takes is not, despite the impression left by the dust jacket blurb, a “freaky” idiosyncratic pop economics argument. Whether Oster takes an “overly simplistic approach that overlooks the subtleties of the data” is something that cannot be determined until we actually read the book.

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