Orlando Patterson, right, is the John Cowles professor of sociology at Harvard University, where Ethan Fosse is a doctoral candidate in sociology. They are co-editors of "The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth."

Every year a Nobel Prize in Economics is awarded when in fact there is no “Nobel Prize in Economics.” There is only a “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.” That prize, which was invented by the Swedish central bank nearly 75 years after Alfred Nobel’s death, is an annoyance to the recipients of the five actual Nobel Prizes, those scholars from excluded scientific disciplines such as astronomy, and a living descendant of the donor, Peter Nobel, who has denounced it as a “PR coup by economists.”

Data based on responses to the General Social Survey, 2006 and 2012.

This raises the question: Have we given economists too much authority based on mistaken views about their scientific reputation among established scientists and the public?

When asked about the degree to which various academic fields can be considered “scientific,” the American public is decidedly more mixed toward economics, ranking it well below established scientific fields such as physics or biology, and even below sociology.

It’s not the statistical models used by economists that is the problem, but the rejection of qualitative methods, other fields and viewpoints. The gulf between the economic view of the world and that of the lived experiences of the general population is often vast. For example, in June 2009, the National Bureau of Economic Research declared that the United States was no longer in a recession, in stark contrast with the felt, economic experience of 88 percent of Americans the following year.

It’s no wonder, then, that the real-world implementation of mainstream economic ideas has been a string of massive failures. Economic thinking undergirded the “deregulation” mantra leading up to the Great Recession of 2007-2009, and has fared no better in attempts to “fix” the ongoing crisis in Europe. However, nowhere is the discipline’s failure more apparent than in the area of development economics. In fact, the only countries that have effectively transformed from the “Third” to the “First World” since World War II violated the main principles of current and previous economic orthodoxies: China plus the “East Asian Tigers” of Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea, whose policies entailed extensive state intervention into the economy, institutional reforms and the manipulation of prices and markets. Only recently have economists come to accept the primacy of institutions in explaining and promoting economic growth, a position long held by sociologists and political scientists.

The dominance of economistic thinking in domestic policymaking has similarly led to expensive, frequently disastrous failures. In many of these instances the expertise of sociologists and other academics more suited to the topics at hand were ignored or thoroughly rejected. A clear case in point is the Moving to Opportunity program, a randomized experiment in the 1990s that moved poor families to slightly less poor neighborhoods. Controversially, the researchers found no impact on earnings or educational attainment. The backlash was severe and swift, as sociologists, many of whom had been studying the impact of neighborhoods on poverty for decades, appropriately criticized the limited intervention and narrow focus on a small set of outcomes over a relatively short time period. It also meant scuttling policies that might have resulted in desegregation and real improvements in the housing and life chances of residents of America’s most impoverished neighborhoods.

While the annual ritual of economists awarding themselves a "Nobel Prize in Economics" may seem purely academic, the devastating consequences of placing too much authority in the ideas and policies of economists is too important to ignore.



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