# A question on academic economics **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [April 7, 2019, 2:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-on-academic-economics/832172 "2019-04-07T14:05:13Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Steven\_Estes](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/94ad74/32.png) [@Steven\_Estes](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steven_Estes)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2019, 2:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-on-academic-economics/832172/1 "2019-04-07T14:05:13Z")
At least a reading of popular reports on academic economies seems to imply that there is absolutely no agreement on anything between liberal and conservative economists. If this is (were) true it renders economics far different from the other Nobel Prize scientific subjects, where evidence nearly inevitably leads to acceptance of one of two sides of an issue. Is this, in fact, the case? Or does it seem to be the case because popular reports tend to cover issues where there is disagreement and there is very much agreement on economic findings of liberals and conservatives? Note: I refer here to empirical findings, not political hopes based on theory. ---
**Author:** ![Ruken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f475e1/32.png) [@Ruken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ruken)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2019, 2:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-on-academic-economics/832172/2 "2019-04-07T14:29:09Z")
I think with any field it’s going to depend on how hard “agree” is and how much hedging you allow. I’m a chemist, dealing with often simple, easily repeatable and observable physical phenomena. But even in chemistry, that’s not always the case. Especially when dealing with chemistry in living systems. Throw behavior into the mix, limit the ability to experiment, and oh hey, look at all these confounding variables . . . it gets hard. IME you’ll see general agreement on [topic] 101 oversimplifications, be it chemistry or econ, but often heavily asterisked. But if you ask, “did the stimulus work?”, you’re going to get a lot of different answers, including “I don’t know” and “We can’t know.” In chemistry, we may see controversy about how the mechanism of a reaction proceeds. We often can’t see the intermediates. We certainly can’t see the transition states. So we we just do our best to eliminate reasonable possibilities, with mixed results. ---
**Author:** ![Ace309](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ace309/32/1050_2.png) [@Ace309](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ace309)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2019, 2:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-on-academic-economics/832172/3 "2019-04-07T14:47:20Z")
Academic economist here. I recently reviewed principles textbooks to decide which one to adopt. Nearly every one ends its first chapter with a long list of things almost all economists agree on. I’m not sure where the idea comes from that there’s nearly no agreement, unless people are treating Krugman’s columns for the times as if they’re economics rather than an opinion column. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2019, 2:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-on-academic-economics/832172/4 "2019-04-07T14:52:59Z")
I don’t think it’s correct to suggest that economists on one side don’t learn from the other side’s views. Here’s one of the most prominent liberal economists discussing one of the most prominent conservatives. > [@Paul Krugman](#): > > What’s odd about Friedman’s absolutism on the virtues of markets and the vices of government is that in his work as an economist’s economist he was actually a model of restraint. As I pointed out earlier, he made great contributions to economic theory by emphasizing the role of individual rationality—but unlike some of his colleagues, he knew where to stop. Why didn’t he exhibit the same restraint in his role as a public intellectual? > > ``` > The answer, I suspect, is that he got caught up in an essentially political role. Milton Friedman the great economist could and did acknowledge ambiguity. But Milton Friedman the great champion of free markets was expected to preach the true faith, not give voice to doubts. And he ended up playing the role his followers expected. As a result, over time the refreshing iconoclasm of his early career hardened into a rigid defense of what had become the new orthodoxy. > > In the long run, great men are remembered for their strengths, not their weaknesses, and Milton Friedman was a very great man indeed—a man of intellectual courage who was one of the most important economic thinkers of all time, and possibly the most brilliant communicator of economic ideas to the general public that ever lived. But there’s a good case for arguing that Friedmanism, in the end, went too far, both as a doctrine and in its practical applications. When Friedman was beginning his career as a public intellectual, the times were ripe for a counterreformation against Keynesianism and all that went with it. But what the world needs now, I’d argue, is a counter-counterreformation. > > ``` [Two of the greatest and most famous economists in history are imagined in a rap-style debate.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk) ---
**Author:** ![Hellestal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/3ab097/32.png) [@Hellestal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hellestal)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2019, 4:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-on-academic-economics/832172/5 "2019-04-07T16:01:53Z")
> [@septimus](#): > > I don’t think it’s correct to suggest that economists on one side don’t learn from the other side’s views. Here’s one of the most prominent liberal economists discussing one of the most prominent conservatives. It’s funny how few changes you could make to that excerpt, in order to make a startlingly accurate description of Krugman himself. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2019, 6:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-on-academic-economics/832172/6 "2019-04-07T18:05:58Z")
Fixed typo in thread title (although “academic edomomics” sounded intriguing). Colibri General Questions Moderator ---
**Author:** ![Ruken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f475e1/32.png) [@Ruken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ruken)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2019, 6:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-on-academic-economics/832172/7 "2019-04-07T18:49:17Z")
I was going to major in edomomics but I never got around to taking the prereqs ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2019, 8:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-on-academic-economics/832172/8 "2019-04-07T20:33:55Z")
Isb’t that dried soybeans? ---
**Author:** ![EdelweissPirate](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8491ac/32.png) [@EdelweissPirate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EdelweissPirate)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2019, 8:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-on-academic-economics/832172/9 "2019-04-07T20:35:45Z")
> [@Steven\_Estes](#): > > […] it renders economics far different from the other Nobel Prize scientific subjects, where evidence nearly inevitably leads to acceptance of one of two sides of an issue. Strictly speaking, the prize in economics is a little different from all the other Nobel prizes, though not quite in the manner you mentioned. Technically, it isn’t even a Nobel Prize but rather “the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.” It was only created in 1968 (about 73 years after the “true” Nobel prizes) and is funded separately. This distinction is fairly trivial in most contexts, IMHO. But it’s different from the prizes in medicine/physiology, physics and chemistry because economics is a social science, not a “hard” science. I’d argue that the social/hard distinction accounts for some of the disagreement you’ve observed. One thing about the social sciences is that descriptive work is often a large part of those fields. While observing phenomena is an important part of the scientific method, many social sciences tend to be long on observation and relatively short on falsifiable hypotheses. As a result, many of the quantitative results are testing ideas that hinge on theory, and economic theory tends to be more politically-inflected than that in other social sciences. So in economics, it can be hard to tease quantitative results apart from their theoretical contexts. And for what it’s worth, resolving disagreements in even the hard sciences isn’t as clean as the OP implies. Members of the general public often imagine that scientific disputes end when one side proves its case and the other concedes, but that’s fairly rare. As Thomas Kuhn famously observed, scientific revolutions typically involve the old guard dying off without adopting new models; when they’re replaced by younger scientists, the new model becomes the standard model. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2019, 9:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-on-academic-economics/832172/10 "2019-04-07T21:13:00Z")
Or to put it more bluntly, the document by which science progresses is not the peer-reviewed paper, but the obituary. And there’s certainly some truth to it, but established scientists do at least attempt to keep on top of current research. ---
**Author:** ![glowacks](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/glowacks/32/5548_2.png) [@glowacks](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/glowacks)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2019, 3:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-on-academic-economics/832172/11 "2019-04-10T03:08:18Z")
Economics does not permit itself to have experiments run in the same way that physics does. As you go down the scale from physics, to chemistry, to biology, to physiology (medicine), to psychology, to sociology, you go from being able to easily replicate the initial conditions to having it be effectively impossible to replicate them because the entire society changes just because the first attempt at an experiment is run and the results become known. You can only gather anecdotal evidence for economic theories, and people can legitimately argue the causes of economic changes simply because they are too complex for anyone to understand. ---
**Author:** ![PatrickLondon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/patricklondon/32/4422_2.png) [@PatrickLondon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PatrickLondon)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2019, 5:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-on-academic-economics/832172/12 "2019-04-10T05:46:56Z")
> [@glowacks](#): > > You can only gather anecdotal evidence for economic theories, and people can legitimately argue the causes of economic changes simply because they are too complex for anyone to understand. Likewise the consequences, since whether they count as success or failure depends on one’s a priori definition of success or failure. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2019, 5:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-on-academic-economics/832172/13 "2019-04-10T05:47:49Z")
We should note that the work that won Nobel Prizes for behavioral economics did involve doing experiments. ---
**Author:** ![UDS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecae2f/32.png) [@UDS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UDS)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2019, 5:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-on-academic-economics/832172/14 "2019-04-10T05:55:03Z")
> [@Steven\_Estes](#): > > At least a reading of popular reports on academic economies seems to imply that there is absolutely no agreement on anything between liberal and conservative economists . . . Gonna stop you there. The great bulk of academic/professional economists would reject the labels “liberal economist” and “conservative economist”. An individual may hold liberal or conservative views, values, opinions, or whatever, but that doesn’t make him a “liberal economist” or a “conservative economist” any more than it would make him a liberal/conservative physicist or a historian or surgeon. Particular economic theories/analyses may appeal to political liberals or political conservatives and be championed by them. For the most part this tells us nothing about their academic rigour or the esteem or degree of acceptance they enjoy within the economics profession.