Justin Fox, Columnist

Economists Profit by Giving Things Away

It's easy to get an economist's paper online, but much harder to find a historian's.

September 1, 2016 at 5:58 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Not the best distribution method for papers.
FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images

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Economics is the most influential social science, and has been for a long time. Why is that? A decade-and-a-half ago, Stanford University economist Edward Lazear offered a famous answer:

Maybe so (there are those who differ!). I can think of at least one other reason for economists’ outsize influence, though. It’s that anyone can get their hands on economists’ research.