Popular economics

As the George Bernard Shaw quip goes, all the economists in the world lined up end-to-end still would not reach a conclusion. A recent New York Times article posits a more concrete conclusion: economics has dominated the national conversation. The study, based on the frequency with which economists are cited in the news and in Congress, found that spikes in references to economists’ expertise correlates with periods of recession or economic downturn. The Great Depression marked the beginning of the shift from the historical viewpoint—which was previously dominant—to an economic one.

The shift is a revealing sign of the times, one in which the economy lingers at the forefront of American minds and in which economics, the discipline, both defines and is adapted to popular appeal. As economics becomes more popular in national discourse, it has given rise to new branches of study. Popular economics for example, like Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitts’s Freakonomics, seek to explore the “hidden side of everything,” laying claim to problems usually tackled by sociologists and historians. This new approach of using economic principles—like rational choice theory—to superimpose upon paradigms traditionally apportioned to other fields has given rise to increased and productive interdisciplinarity.

Duke’s economics department—ranked one of the best in the country—has adopted this interdisciplinary approach, expanding to include fields like decision neuroscience and behavioral economics to broaden its horizons and expand its appeal. Behavioral economics, for example, introduces psychology into mix, and the philosophy, politics and economics certificate seeks to expose the philosophical and political roots of economic science. The growing popularity of economics as a major—it is the third most popular major behind biology and public policy—reflects both the success of the program and the increasing dominance of the economic discipline in the post-graduate world.

The rise of economics also reflects a growing paradigm shift away from qualitative analyses and toward quantitative argumentation. In today’s world, numbers lend credibility. Statistics—percentages and data packaged in striking graphs showing the correlation between sleep and happiness, for example—seem to be both prerequisite and guarantor of legitimacy. This obsession with number-based argumentation has begun to percolate fields where the qualitative-quantitative dichotomy has not always been so divisive, like history and sociology. By contrast, economics as a discipline naturally relies on strong quantitative and statistical analysis. Such a focus appeals to the contemporary biases towards numbers and the causal relationships they intuit, particularly when leveraged for policy-making decisions.

But should we always turn to economists for answers, or is there value in closing the gap between the airtime apportioned to economists, historians, sociologists and other academic perspectives? If economists continue to hold the lion’s share of national attention, we need to do more to close the gap between the pure economic analysis done by economists and the popular science as understood by broader society. The first step is recognizing how economics is adapted—and over-simplified—to the public discourse. As economic issues continue to dominate the forefront of public discourse, we should embrace the expertise it can provide while also being mindful that their quantitative expertise is used in the appropriate context and that it does not detract from the insights other, more qualitative fields can provide.