I'm not an economist. I'm a consumer (or sufferer) of economics, and not a producer. Economics has tremendous prestige and is influential in many vitally important areas (notably public policy, legal theory, and public opinion), so I watch economics from the outside and try to figure out what's going on. My studies could be described as a natural history of economics (studying economics as it functions in its environment), or as "science studies", or best of all, as "public philosophy".

Economists vary in the degree to which they think that economists should participate in the public philosophy dialogue. Sen, Krugman, and DeLong are happy to do so, and Sen even regards the "public philosophy" component as an essential part of his work. But there's another tendency, which I think is stronger, for economists to regard their science as a transcendent form of scientific expertise, like quantum physics and evolutionary biology, which no layman is qualified to criticize.

One reason this analogy doesn't work for me is simply that I have no actual problem with quantum physics or evolutionary biology, whereas I do with economics. For one thing, economics is intrinsically political, ideological, and ethical in ways that those sciences are not. I also do not believe that economics is good as is claimed -- it's certainly not the "true science" that Lazear says that it is. And there really are not a lot of fully-credentialed physicists and biologists attacking evolutionary ethics and quantum theory, but a lot of economists attack contemporary economics (especially, but not only, the dominant school of marginalist neoclassical economics.)

I'm mostly concerned with the median and modal American economist  during my lifetime (DOB 1946). Not the guys on the cutting edge of the field, but the bulk-product econ PhDs and BSs. It doesn't surprise me to hear that economists (sensu latu) were already saying what I'm saying way back in 1940 or 1900, but as far as I know, by 1970 weren't saying it any more. I know that there are contemporary economists who are moving away from the things I'm objecting to, but these heterodox economists still seem to be marginal. And the mainstream economists (e.g. Lazear above, or Steven Durlauf, or Tyler Cowen) seem to be complacent and more or less oblivious, and since I know that there's a lot of turbulence in the field which they are not acknowledging, to me their indifference seems diagnostic of entrenched arrogance.

While I am not a friend of economics, I have succeeded in controlling my urge to say that it's all just a bunch of crap. As time goes on I'll try to sort out, to my own satisfaction, what is valuable in economics from what is useless or harmful.

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Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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