These rankings reflect something broader than just the tastes of one newspaper’s editors, as the pecking order among the social sciences at The Times roughly mirrors that on Capitol Hill. A similar search of the Congressional Record over the past 25 years reveals that the term “economist” was most likely to be mentioned, with historians and psychologists again the next most popular.

Most striking is the poor showing of sociology, whose relevance to policy makers appears to be minimal, even though it focuses on many of our most pressing problems, including families, crime, education, aging, religion, community, inequality and poverty.

Of course, sociologists, whose comparative advantage is in offering structural explanations, might point to the fact that their field has no equivalent of the business pages, that the president does not receive advice from a Council of Sociological Advisers, and that there’s little demand from Wall Street for sociological insights. Perhaps, although topics like crime, family and faith are grist for the daily newspapers; an array of federal agencies are responsible for dealing with topics like housing, education, labor and human services; and Silicon Valley is hungry for insights from sociologists who study networks.

More tellingly, as Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard, recently noted, sociology has limited impact even on issues central to the discipline. The most striking example he offered was that it appears that no sociologists were consulted in the deliberations surrounding President Obama’s “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative to combat the problems afflicting black youth, even as the insights of economists were sought.

Economists might instead look to the forces of supply and demand to understand their relative popularity. But it is not due to supply. As data from the Census Bureau suggests, while about 1.5 million Americans are economics majors, there is a far greater supply of psychology majors (3.4 million) and history majors (1.6 million), and only slightly fewer sociology majors (1.3 million).

This economist is drawn to conclude that if our relative success is not due to supply, then it must be demand, which means that our popularity reflects the discerning tastes of our audience in the marketplace of ideas.