economists are just sociologists with good math skills? welcome to the club!

Over at Econlog, Bryan Caplan finds it hard to say what is “economics” when economists produce research that has little direct connection to classical economic questions about incentives and trade-offs. These days, you’ll find economists studying things such as weight, happiness psychology, and AIDS transmission – and producing non-economic answers. In the end, he realizes that economists have begun to drop their ties to pointless academic models and started focusing on real problems. And that’s a good thing! The community of knowledge is always improved when smart people use their tools for addressing important issues.

At the end, Bryan considers how economics might be the science of society – until he realizes that there already is a science of society! It’s called sociology:

Unfortunately, this puts me in an awkward position.  There’s another field that already sounds like “the all-encompassing study of the social world”: sociology.  Not only does sociology have lower status than economics; with honorable exceptions, it’s also well-stocked with academics who aren’t fond of economics.  Tactically, then, it would be foolish to start calling ourselves “sociologists.”  If we were picking names from scratch, though, “sociologists” is exactly what modern economists ought to proudly call ourselves.

Give in to the dark side, Bryan! Let your inner sociologist come out!

On a more serious note, Bryan’s post raises questions about the economics profession and its boundaries. Here’s a thumbnail sketch of modern economics and its relation to other disciplines:

	Economic theories
	Yes	No
Economic topic  Yes	traditional economics	economic history, economic sociology, management, applied stats
No	applied micro, rational choice in other disciplines	other social sciences, “renegade” economists

A massive simplification, but it captures important stuff. Until the 1970s, nearly all mainstream economists were stuck in the upper left corner. Then, Becker, Downs, Olson, and others started producing economic analysis of non-commercial topics (e.g., fertility, voting, etc.) Now it was cool to move into the lower left box.

In the 1990s, you saw two new developments that made the right hand side of the table cool. First, economic sociology began to flower as a distinct specialty, inspired by earlier work by Granovetter, Swedberg, Baker, and others.  Second, economists minimized the theory and just did very careful statistics on various non-economic topics. This is embodied in the work that Caplan cites (e.g., Wolfers on happiness, or Ostrom on AIDS transmission). Aside from the boilerplate “life is always about trade-offs,” there’s almost nothing economic at all. For example, one of Ostrom’s big arguments is that AIDS transmission runs along transportation routes in Africa.

What do we do now? Abolish the boundaries between fields? I’m in favor of that. Sociologists and economists can learn a lot of good stuff from each other, but I doubt it will happen. There’s seems to be a lot invested in keeping the boundaries well guarded. The “applied micro” folks find it really convenient to pretend that sociologists haven’t discovered anything of importance on topics like marriage or income, while sociologists believe that they are the noble alternative to evil conservative math-bots. Until that changes, economists will bravely go where others have gone before and the sociologists will continue charging at windmills.