Exciting Economics Is Often Misguided Economics
Breakthroughs in the field are rare, but we have an impressive catalogue of possible solutions to real-word problems.
Economics studied here.
Photographer: Adam Glanzman/Bloomberg
In the long-running popular series about what’s wrong with economics, there is a new entry: Our profession is too insular. “Economists generally agree that competition is good, and that markets with only a few dominant players are inefficient,” writes the economist David Deming in the Atlantic. “We may need to take a hard look in the mirror.”
Citing a new research paper by (naturally) four economists, which analyzes almost 6,000 award-wining academics in 18 disciplines, he notes that the recipients of the major economics prizes, including the Nobel, “have collectively spent half their career at just eight universities: Harvard (where I teach), Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, the University of Chicago, Columbia and Berkeley.” This is a far higher level of concentration than other fields.