Question: When was the last time an economist had big impact outside economics? It’s been a while. Gary Becker might be the best example, but that was in the 1970s – forty years ago!!! Of course, there are individual papers or research findings that attract interest (e.g., Deaton’s recent work on mortality), but more recent examples of work that change areas outside economics are hard to find. For example, Steve Levitt is hugely popular, but he hasn’t changed the way people think about areas outside of economics. At best, the big message of early 2000s “cute-o-nomics” is that we can try harder to find clean identification in naturally occurring data. Not a bad message, but not epic, either. And a lot of people were kind of doing that already.

More recently, one might think of Daron Acemoglu, for his massive work on development, or Esther Duflo for field experiments. Both are clearly high impact scholars, but I’d guess that they are high impact within specific areas. You don’t see conferences on the theoretical implications of Duflo or Acemoglu on other disciplines, or even on areas outside of their expertise. Their work doesn’t travel the way Becker’s did, or the way game theory or early econometrics did

Why? Unclear to me. In terms of quality, the average economist is probably stronger than in the past. On the other hand, most of the training in economics programs is on model building. Culturally, economists have developed a disdain for other areas, so they have little incentive to produce work that speaks to anyone except themselves. Then, there are financial incentives. If your salary is way above other disciplines, and you have great job prospects, influencing other fields probably isn’t worth your time. The only thing worth your time is really impressing elites within the field. Not a bad thing per se, but it is not the right environment for work that will reverberate across the academy. Maybe the simplest explanation is low hanging fruit – you have a big impact by bringing a simple idea to an adjacent area. Once that is done, all you are left with are hard problems that only insiders care about.

That’s too bad. I love sociology but I also feel excitement and challenge when a major figure steps up and offers a new way forward. I’d like to see more of it. Not just from sociology, but also from other fields.

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