The Superiority of Economists
La superioridad de los economistas
Article Sidebar
PDF (Español (España))
FLIP
HTML (Español (España))
How to Cite
[1]
Fourcade, M., Ollion, E. and Algan, Y. 2015. The Superiority of Economists. Revista de Economía Institucional. 17, 33 (Dec. 2015), 13–43. DOI:https://doi.org/10.18601/01245996.v17n33.02.
Section
Articles
Main Article Content
Abstract
In this essay, we investigate the dominant position of economics within the network of the social sciences in the United States. We begin by documenting the relative insularity of economics, using bibliometric data. Next we analyze the tight management of the field from the top down, which gives economics its characteristic hierarchical structure. Economists also distinguish themselves from other social scientists through their much better material situation (many teach in business schools, have external consulting activities), their more individualist worldviews, and in the confidence they have in their discipline’s ability to fix the world’s problems. Taken together, these traits constitute what we call the superiority of economists, where economists’ objective supremacy is intimately linked with their subjective sense of authority and entitlement. While this superiority has certainly fueled economists’ practical involvement and their considerable influence over the economy, it has also exposed them more to conflicts of interests, political critique, even derision.
Downloads
Download data is not yet available.
Article Details
References (SEE)
Abbott, A. Chaos of disciplines, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Abbott, A. 2005. “The idea of outcome in U.S. sociology”, G. Steinmetz,ed., The politics of methods in the human sciences: Positivism and its epistemological others, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, pp.393-426.
Angrist, J. D. y J.-S. Pischke. “The credibility revolution in empirical economics: How better research design is taking the con out of econometrics”, Journal of Economic Perspectives 24, 2, 2010, pp. 3-30.
Banerjee, A. V. y E. Duflo. Poor economics: A radical rethinking of the way to fight global poverty, Gurgaon, Random House, 2013.
Baron, J. N. y M. T. Hannan. “The impact of economics on contemporary sociology”, Journal of Economic Literature 32, 3, 1994, pp.1111-1146.
Blau, F. D. “Report of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession”, American Economic Review 96, 2, 2006,pp. 519-526.
Blyth, M. Great transformations: Economic ideas and institutional change in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,2002.
Bourdieu, P. Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste, Cambridge,Harvard University Press, 1984.
Bourdieu, P. Homo Academicus, Stanford, Stanford University Press,1988.
Bourdieu, P. y L. J. Wacquant. An invitation to reflexive sociology,Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Bowles, S. “Endogenous preferences: The cultural consequences of markets and other economic institutions”, Journal of Economic Literature 36, 1, 1998, pp. 75-111.
Callon, M. “Introduction: The embeddedness of economic markets in economics”, The laws of the markets, Oxford, Blackwell, 1998, pp. 1-57.
Card, D. y S. DellaVigna. “Nine facts about top journals in economics”,Journal of Economic Literature 51, 1, 2013, pp. 144-1461.
Clemens, E. S.; W. W. Powell et al. “Careers in print: Books, journals,and scholarly reputations”, American Journal of Sociology 101, 2,1995, pp. 433-494.
Colander, D. “The making of an economist redux”, Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, 1, 2005, pp. 175-198.
Cole, S. “The hierarchy of the sciences?”, American Journal of Sociology 89, 1, 1983, pp. 111-139.
Coupe, T. “Revealed performances. Worldwide rankings of economists and economics departments 1969-2000”, Universidad Libre de Bruselas, 2004 [http://web.archive.org/web/20070717035652/http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~tcoupe/ranking.html].
Ellison, G. “How does the market use citation data? The Hirsch Index in economics”, NBER working paper 16419, 2010.
Ellison, G. “Is peer review in decline?”, Economic Inquiry 49, 3, 2011,pp. 635-657.
Fehr, E. y K. Hoff. “Introduction. Tastes, castes and culture: The influence of society on preferences”, Economic Journal 121, 556, 2011,pp. F396-F412.
Fligstein, N. y T. Shin. “Shareholder value and the transformation of the U.S. economy, 1984-2000”, Sociological Forum 22, 4, 2007, pp.399-424.
Fourcade, M. “The construction of a global profession: The transnationalization of economics”, American Journal of Sociology 112, 1,2006, pp. 145-194.
Fourcade, M. 2009. Economists and societies: Discipline and profession in the United States, Great Britain, and France, 1890s to 1990s, Princeton y Oxford, Princeton University Press.
Fourcade, M. y R. Khurana. “From social control to financial economics:The linked ecologies of economics and business in Twentieth Century America”, Theory and Society 42, 2, 2013, pp. 121-159.
Frank, D. J. y J. Gabler. Reconstructing the University: Worldwide shifts in academia in the 20th Century, Stanford, Stanford University Press,2006.
Frank, R. H.; T. Gilovich y D. T. Regan. “Does studying economics inhibit cooperation?”, Journal of Economic Perspectives 7, 2, 1993, pp. 159-171.
Freeman, R. B. “It’s better being an economist (But don’t tell anyone)”,Journal of Economic Perspectives 13, 3, 1999, pp. 139-145.
Frey, B. S. y S. Meier. “Selfish and indoctrinated economists?”, European Journal of Law and Economics 19, 2, 2005, pp. 165-171.
Godechot, O. “How did the neoclassical paradigm conquer a multidisciplinary research institution?”, Revue de la régulation 10, 2011,[http://regulation.revues.org/9429].
Gross, N. Why are professors liberal and why so conservatives care?,Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2013.
Gross, N. y S. Simmons. “The social and political views of American professors”, working paper, 2007, [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/ download?doi=10.1.1.147.6141&rep=rep1&type=pdf].
Hamermesh, D. S. “Six decades of top economics publishing: Who and how?”, Journal of Economic Literature 51, 1, 2013, pp. 162-172.
Han, S.-K. “Tribal regimes in academia: A comparative analysis of market structure across disciplines”, Social Networks 25, 2003, 3, pp. 251-280.
Hansen, W. L. “The education and training of economics doctorates: Major findings of the Executive Secretary of the American Economic Association’s Commission on Graduate Education in Economics”, Journal of Economic Literature 29, 3, 1991, pp. 1054-1087.
Haskell, T. L. The emergence of professional social science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century crisis of authority, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
Heilbron, J.; J. Verhael y S. Quak. “The origins and early diffusion of ‘shareholder value’ in the United States”, Theory and Society 43, 1, 2014, pp. 1-22.40
Hirshman, D. y E. P. Berman. “Do economists make policies? On the political effects of economics”, Socio-Economic Review 12, 4, 2014, pp. 779-811.
Isaac, J. “Theorist at work: Talcott Parsons and the Carnegie Project on Theory, 1949-1951”, Journal of the History of Ideas 71, 2, 2010, pp. 287-311.
Jacobs, J. A. In defense of disciplines: Interdisciplinarity and specialization in the research university, Chicago y Londres, University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Jelveh, Z.; B. Kogut y S. Naidu. “Political language in economics”,Columbia Business School research paper 14-57, 2014.
Jovanovic, F. “The construction of the canonical history of financial economics”, History of Political Economy 40, 2, 2008, pp. 213-242.
Jung, J. y F. Dobbin. “Finance and institutional investors”, K. K. Cetina y A. Preda, eds., The Oxford handbook of the sociology of finance,Nueva York, Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 52-74.
Kelly, M. A. y S. Bruestle. “Trends of subjects published in economic journals, 1969-2007”, Economic Inquiry 49, 3, 2011, pp. 658-673.
Keynes, J. M. Essays in persuasion [1931], Nueva York, W. W. Norton,1962.
Krugman, P. “How did economists get it so wrong?”, New York Times Magazine, 2 de septiembre de 2009.
Laband, D. N. y M. J. Piette. “Favoritism versus search for good papers: Empirical evidence regarding the behavior of journal editors”, Journal of Political Economy 102, 1, 1994, pp. 194-203.
Ladd, E. C. y S. M. Lipset. The divided academy: Professors and politics,Nueva York, W. W. Norton, 1976.
Lamont, M. How professors think: Inside the curious world of academic judgment, Cambridge y Londres, Harvard University Press, 2009.
Lazear, E. P. “Economic imperialism”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 115, 1, 2000, pp. 99-146.
Leamer, E. “Tantalus on the road to Asymptopia”, Journal of Economic Perspectives 24, 2, 2010, pp. 31-46.
Lebaron, F. La croyance économique. Les économistes entre science et politique, París, Seuil, 2000.
Lévi-Strauss, C. The elementary structures of kinship [1949], Boston,Mass., Beacon Press, 1969.
MacKenzie, D. An engine, not a camera: How financial models shape markets, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2006.
Marwell, G. y R. E. Ames. “Economists free ride, does anyone else? Experiments on the provision of public goods”, Journal of Public Economics 15, 3, 1981, pp. 295-310.
Medoff, M. H. “Editorial favoritism in economics?”, Southern Economic Journal 70, 2, 2003, pp. 425-434.
Mirowski, P. More heat than light. Economics as social physics, physics as nature’s economics, Nueva York, Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Mitchell, T. “Fixing the economy”, Cultural Studies 12, 1, 1998, pp.82-101.
Montecinos, V. y J. Markoff, eds. Economists in the Americas, Cheltenham y Northampton, Edward Elgar, 2009.
Nik-K., E. y R. van Horn. “Inland empire: Economics’ imperialism as an imperative of Chicago neoliberalism”, Journal of Economic Methodology 19, 3, 2012, pp. 259-282.
Ollion, E. y A. Abbott. “Quarante ans de sociologie française aux États-Unis. Note sur la réception des sociologues français OutreAtlantique (1960-2009)”, D. Demaziere, D. Lorrain y C. Paradeise,eds., Transmissions. Une communauté en héritage, París, PUF, de próxima publicación.
Pieters, R. y H. Baumgartner. “Who talks to whom? Intra and interdisciplinary communications of economic journals”, Journal of Economic Literature 40, 2, 2002, pp. 483-509.
Piketty, T. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2014.
Prasad, M. The politics of free markets: The rise of neoliberal economic policies in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, Chicago y Londres, University of Chicago Press, 2006.
R Core Team. R: A language and environment for statistical computing,Viena, R Foundation for Statistical Computing, 2014, [http:// www.R-project.org/].
Ross, D. The origins of American social science, Nueva York, Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Sapienza, P. y L. Zingales. “Economic experts versus average Americans”,American Economic Review 103, 3, 2013, pp. 636-642.
Sims, C. A. “But economics is not an experimental science”, Journal of Economic Perspectives 24, 2, 2010, pp. 59-68.
Steinmetz, G., ed. The politics of method in the human sciences: Positivism and its epistemological others, Durham y Londres, Duke University Press, 2005.
Stigler, G. y G. Becker. “De gustibus non est disputandum”, American Economic Review 67, 2, 1977, pp. 76-90.
Thaler, R. H. y C. R. Sunstein. Nudge. Improving decisions about health,wealth and happiness, Nueva York, Penguin Books, 2008.
Weyl, G. “Finance and the common good”, Conclusión de Après le déluge: Finance and the common good after the crisis, E. Glaeser, T. Santos y G. Weyl, eds., Chicago y Londres, University of Chicago Press, de próxima publicación.
Whaples, R. “The policy views of American Economic Association members: The results of a new survey”, Economic Journal Watch 6, 3,2009, pp. 337-348.
Whitley, R. The intellectual and social organization of the sciences,Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984.
Wu, S. “Recent publishing trends at the AER, JPE and QJE”, Applied Economics Letters 14, 1, 2007, pp. 59-63.
Young, C. “The emergence of sociology from political economy in the United States: 1890 to 1940”, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 45, 2, 2009, pp. 91-116.
Zingales, L. “Preventing economists’ capture”, D. Carpenter y D. A. Moss, eds., Preventing regulatory capture: Special interest influence and how to limit it, cap. 6, Nueva York, Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Abbott, A. 2005. “The idea of outcome in U.S. sociology”, G. Steinmetz,ed., The politics of methods in the human sciences: Positivism and its epistemological others, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, pp.393-426.
Angrist, J. D. y J.-S. Pischke. “The credibility revolution in empirical economics: How better research design is taking the con out of econometrics”, Journal of Economic Perspectives 24, 2, 2010, pp. 3-30.
Banerjee, A. V. y E. Duflo. Poor economics: A radical rethinking of the way to fight global poverty, Gurgaon, Random House, 2013.
Baron, J. N. y M. T. Hannan. “The impact of economics on contemporary sociology”, Journal of Economic Literature 32, 3, 1994, pp.1111-1146.
Blau, F. D. “Report of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession”, American Economic Review 96, 2, 2006,pp. 519-526.
Blyth, M. Great transformations: Economic ideas and institutional change in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,2002.
Bourdieu, P. Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste, Cambridge,Harvard University Press, 1984.
Bourdieu, P. Homo Academicus, Stanford, Stanford University Press,1988.
Bourdieu, P. y L. J. Wacquant. An invitation to reflexive sociology,Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Bowles, S. “Endogenous preferences: The cultural consequences of markets and other economic institutions”, Journal of Economic Literature 36, 1, 1998, pp. 75-111.
Callon, M. “Introduction: The embeddedness of economic markets in economics”, The laws of the markets, Oxford, Blackwell, 1998, pp. 1-57.
Card, D. y S. DellaVigna. “Nine facts about top journals in economics”,Journal of Economic Literature 51, 1, 2013, pp. 144-1461.
Clemens, E. S.; W. W. Powell et al. “Careers in print: Books, journals,and scholarly reputations”, American Journal of Sociology 101, 2,1995, pp. 433-494.
Colander, D. “The making of an economist redux”, Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, 1, 2005, pp. 175-198.
Cole, S. “The hierarchy of the sciences?”, American Journal of Sociology 89, 1, 1983, pp. 111-139.
Coupe, T. “Revealed performances. Worldwide rankings of economists and economics departments 1969-2000”, Universidad Libre de Bruselas, 2004 [http://web.archive.org/web/20070717035652/http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~tcoupe/ranking.html].
Ellison, G. “How does the market use citation data? The Hirsch Index in economics”, NBER working paper 16419, 2010.
Ellison, G. “Is peer review in decline?”, Economic Inquiry 49, 3, 2011,pp. 635-657.
Fehr, E. y K. Hoff. “Introduction. Tastes, castes and culture: The influence of society on preferences”, Economic Journal 121, 556, 2011,pp. F396-F412.
Fligstein, N. y T. Shin. “Shareholder value and the transformation of the U.S. economy, 1984-2000”, Sociological Forum 22, 4, 2007, pp.399-424.
Fourcade, M. “The construction of a global profession: The transnationalization of economics”, American Journal of Sociology 112, 1,2006, pp. 145-194.
Fourcade, M. 2009. Economists and societies: Discipline and profession in the United States, Great Britain, and France, 1890s to 1990s, Princeton y Oxford, Princeton University Press.
Fourcade, M. y R. Khurana. “From social control to financial economics:The linked ecologies of economics and business in Twentieth Century America”, Theory and Society 42, 2, 2013, pp. 121-159.
Frank, D. J. y J. Gabler. Reconstructing the University: Worldwide shifts in academia in the 20th Century, Stanford, Stanford University Press,2006.
Frank, R. H.; T. Gilovich y D. T. Regan. “Does studying economics inhibit cooperation?”, Journal of Economic Perspectives 7, 2, 1993, pp. 159-171.
Freeman, R. B. “It’s better being an economist (But don’t tell anyone)”,Journal of Economic Perspectives 13, 3, 1999, pp. 139-145.
Frey, B. S. y S. Meier. “Selfish and indoctrinated economists?”, European Journal of Law and Economics 19, 2, 2005, pp. 165-171.
Godechot, O. “How did the neoclassical paradigm conquer a multidisciplinary research institution?”, Revue de la régulation 10, 2011,[http://regulation.revues.org/9429].
Gross, N. Why are professors liberal and why so conservatives care?,Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2013.
Gross, N. y S. Simmons. “The social and political views of American professors”, working paper, 2007, [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/ download?doi=10.1.1.147.6141&rep=rep1&type=pdf].
Hamermesh, D. S. “Six decades of top economics publishing: Who and how?”, Journal of Economic Literature 51, 1, 2013, pp. 162-172.
Han, S.-K. “Tribal regimes in academia: A comparative analysis of market structure across disciplines”, Social Networks 25, 2003, 3, pp. 251-280.
Hansen, W. L. “The education and training of economics doctorates: Major findings of the Executive Secretary of the American Economic Association’s Commission on Graduate Education in Economics”, Journal of Economic Literature 29, 3, 1991, pp. 1054-1087.
Haskell, T. L. The emergence of professional social science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century crisis of authority, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
Heilbron, J.; J. Verhael y S. Quak. “The origins and early diffusion of ‘shareholder value’ in the United States”, Theory and Society 43, 1, 2014, pp. 1-22.40
Hirshman, D. y E. P. Berman. “Do economists make policies? On the political effects of economics”, Socio-Economic Review 12, 4, 2014, pp. 779-811.
Isaac, J. “Theorist at work: Talcott Parsons and the Carnegie Project on Theory, 1949-1951”, Journal of the History of Ideas 71, 2, 2010, pp. 287-311.
Jacobs, J. A. In defense of disciplines: Interdisciplinarity and specialization in the research university, Chicago y Londres, University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Jelveh, Z.; B. Kogut y S. Naidu. “Political language in economics”,Columbia Business School research paper 14-57, 2014.
Jovanovic, F. “The construction of the canonical history of financial economics”, History of Political Economy 40, 2, 2008, pp. 213-242.
Jung, J. y F. Dobbin. “Finance and institutional investors”, K. K. Cetina y A. Preda, eds., The Oxford handbook of the sociology of finance,Nueva York, Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 52-74.
Kelly, M. A. y S. Bruestle. “Trends of subjects published in economic journals, 1969-2007”, Economic Inquiry 49, 3, 2011, pp. 658-673.
Keynes, J. M. Essays in persuasion [1931], Nueva York, W. W. Norton,1962.
Krugman, P. “How did economists get it so wrong?”, New York Times Magazine, 2 de septiembre de 2009.
Laband, D. N. y M. J. Piette. “Favoritism versus search for good papers: Empirical evidence regarding the behavior of journal editors”, Journal of Political Economy 102, 1, 1994, pp. 194-203.
Ladd, E. C. y S. M. Lipset. The divided academy: Professors and politics,Nueva York, W. W. Norton, 1976.
Lamont, M. How professors think: Inside the curious world of academic judgment, Cambridge y Londres, Harvard University Press, 2009.
Lazear, E. P. “Economic imperialism”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 115, 1, 2000, pp. 99-146.
Leamer, E. “Tantalus on the road to Asymptopia”, Journal of Economic Perspectives 24, 2, 2010, pp. 31-46.
Lebaron, F. La croyance économique. Les économistes entre science et politique, París, Seuil, 2000.
Lévi-Strauss, C. The elementary structures of kinship [1949], Boston,Mass., Beacon Press, 1969.
MacKenzie, D. An engine, not a camera: How financial models shape markets, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2006.
Marwell, G. y R. E. Ames. “Economists free ride, does anyone else? Experiments on the provision of public goods”, Journal of Public Economics 15, 3, 1981, pp. 295-310.
Medoff, M. H. “Editorial favoritism in economics?”, Southern Economic Journal 70, 2, 2003, pp. 425-434.
Mirowski, P. More heat than light. Economics as social physics, physics as nature’s economics, Nueva York, Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Mitchell, T. “Fixing the economy”, Cultural Studies 12, 1, 1998, pp.82-101.
Montecinos, V. y J. Markoff, eds. Economists in the Americas, Cheltenham y Northampton, Edward Elgar, 2009.
Nik-K., E. y R. van Horn. “Inland empire: Economics’ imperialism as an imperative of Chicago neoliberalism”, Journal of Economic Methodology 19, 3, 2012, pp. 259-282.
Ollion, E. y A. Abbott. “Quarante ans de sociologie française aux États-Unis. Note sur la réception des sociologues français OutreAtlantique (1960-2009)”, D. Demaziere, D. Lorrain y C. Paradeise,eds., Transmissions. Une communauté en héritage, París, PUF, de próxima publicación.
Pieters, R. y H. Baumgartner. “Who talks to whom? Intra and interdisciplinary communications of economic journals”, Journal of Economic Literature 40, 2, 2002, pp. 483-509.
Piketty, T. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2014.
Prasad, M. The politics of free markets: The rise of neoliberal economic policies in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, Chicago y Londres, University of Chicago Press, 2006.
R Core Team. R: A language and environment for statistical computing,Viena, R Foundation for Statistical Computing, 2014, [http:// www.R-project.org/].
Ross, D. The origins of American social science, Nueva York, Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Sapienza, P. y L. Zingales. “Economic experts versus average Americans”,American Economic Review 103, 3, 2013, pp. 636-642.
Sims, C. A. “But economics is not an experimental science”, Journal of Economic Perspectives 24, 2, 2010, pp. 59-68.
Steinmetz, G., ed. The politics of method in the human sciences: Positivism and its epistemological others, Durham y Londres, Duke University Press, 2005.
Stigler, G. y G. Becker. “De gustibus non est disputandum”, American Economic Review 67, 2, 1977, pp. 76-90.
Thaler, R. H. y C. R. Sunstein. Nudge. Improving decisions about health,wealth and happiness, Nueva York, Penguin Books, 2008.
Weyl, G. “Finance and the common good”, Conclusión de Après le déluge: Finance and the common good after the crisis, E. Glaeser, T. Santos y G. Weyl, eds., Chicago y Londres, University of Chicago Press, de próxima publicación.
Whaples, R. “The policy views of American Economic Association members: The results of a new survey”, Economic Journal Watch 6, 3,2009, pp. 337-348.
Whitley, R. The intellectual and social organization of the sciences,Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984.
Wu, S. “Recent publishing trends at the AER, JPE and QJE”, Applied Economics Letters 14, 1, 2007, pp. 59-63.
Young, C. “The emergence of sociology from political economy in the United States: 1890 to 1940”, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 45, 2, 2009, pp. 91-116.
Zingales, L. “Preventing economists’ capture”, D. Carpenter y D. A. Moss, eds., Preventing regulatory capture: Special interest influence and how to limit it, cap. 6, Nueva York, Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Citado por
