Why are economists more prominent than historians?
Justin Fox recently sat down with a bunch of historians to talk about why economists had lapped them in the public debate. Fox's explanation was interesting, and so too was the historians':
One answer I offered was that economists had managed a remarkable balancing act between making the guts of their work totally incomprehensible — and thus forbiddingly impressive — to the outside world while continuing to offer reasonably straightforward conclusions. The basic form of an academic economics paper is a couple of comprehensible paragraphs at the beginning and a couple of comprehensible paragraphs at the end, with a bunch of really-hard-to-follow math or statistical analysis in the middle. An academic history paper, on the other hand, is often an uninterrupted cascade of semi-comprehensible jargon that neither impresses a lay reader nor offers any clear conclusions.
The one economist in the audience had another suggestion. Most economic work was aimed at prediction, and the world is always hungry for predictions. He added that most macroeconomic predictions are worthless (he was a microeconomist), but that doesn't seem to have damped the demand for them.
After the conference, at dinner, I heard another explanation from the historians themselves. It's that, especially in the U.S., only the tiniest minority of academic historians concern themselves anymore with matters of economic policy (or diplomacy, or war, or politics in the big-picture sense). The discipline has moved mostly to the study of identity (gender, race, etc.) and culture, ceding territory to the economists and political scientists. Yeah, yeah, there's always Niall Ferguson. But he's more the exception that proves the rule — not to mention, in the view of academic historians, a pop-culture figure who is no longer really one of them.
I've spent some time thinking about this and I think the "predictions" explanation holds a lot of weight. But I also think that the answer is partly that the public debate is substantially about what's happening with the economy. That's true when you're talking about the economy, but it's also true when you're talking about something like health care, where the majority of the discussion focused on the bill's impact on deficits and premiums and paychecks. And it'll be true when talking about financial regulation (will it reduce the availability of credit?) and mostly true when talking about cap-and-trade (will it hurt growth or my bank account?).
I think that's where some of the confusion over the eminence of economists comes into play: We seem to talk about a lot of issues in Washington, and so people miss that we're actually talking about a lot of different dimensions of one thing. But insofar as there's a problem, that's the one I'd point to: A warming earth is a problem, and so too are 50 million uninsured, but the debate is used to judging things by their aggregate impact on GDP or the deficit, and so that's how things get judged.