This paper explores the culture in which academic economists work, and tries to show how an appreciation of this culture makes their work more understandable and valuable to mainstream sociology. Economists are not interested in representing reality, but in constructing models that simplify reality to isolate mechanisms that account for observed phenomena. Economists have a distinctive epistemic culture, sustained by the discourse through which they talk and think about their work. This discourse mediates the relationship between the mathematical models they devise and the economic phenomena to which they apply. This study reveals economists' culture based on in-depth interviews with academic economists and an ethnographic study of economic departments in Israel.
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Impressed by the analytical tools of economists and by their social standing, other sociologists, however, have sought to apply economic methods and reasoning in dealing with sociological questions (e.g., Coleman, 1990). The soundness of economic theory thus involves not only a struggle over its ability to make economic phenomena more comprehensible, but also a conflict over the identity of the sociological profession itself. Many sociologists are somewhere between the two poles: they are critical of economics, yet borrow some of its concepts and ideas to explain social behavior and organizations (e.g., Goldthorpe, 2000; Sørensen, 1996).
Similar criticism is aimed at neoclassical economic theory from within the economic discipline itself, but this criticism—when it comes from rival schools, such as institutionalism (e.g., Bush, 1991; Dugger, 1979; Klein, 1980), Marxism (e.g., Bowles and Gintis, 1990), and post-Keynesian perspectives (e.g., Harcourt and Hamouda, 1988)—can also be attributed to the same kind of judging of others' cultures based on one's own culture. Neoclassical methodologists, who defend neoclassical orientations, have also struggled with what appears to them as a gap between economic theories and the economic reality, and they have suggested various justifications for this gap (e.g., Blaug, 1975, 1994; Caldwell, 1994; De Marchi and Blaug, 1991; Friedman, 1953; Hoover 2001).
In a wonderful piece written long ago, the Norwegian economist Axel Leijonhofvud (1973) described economists as an exotic indigenous people, using the classical anthropological account as a template. His essay is both amusing and insightful. For example, he treats mathematical models as totems and describes how tribesmen, that is, economists, are judged according to their mastering of the rituals related to these totems. Some may see Leijonhofvud's piece as a satire, but in our reading it is not more than an amused look at one's own practice without really intending to debunk or challenge it. In any case, his piece is based on deep understanding of the social, cultural, and ritual elements of modern economics and is worth reading even more than 30 years after its publication.
For all practical matters, Israeli economics is part of the American mainstream. In a ranking based on publication rates in the mainstream journals, the two leading departments in Israel, Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew university, occupied the 25th and 48th places, respectively, in the world ranking; three other institutions occupied the 83rd, 140th, and 154th places, while the sixth has not made it into the world ranking, holding the 98th place among European universities (Kalaitzidakis et al., 2003). Most of our interviewees got their PhDs from major research universities in the United States (e.g., Minnesota, Princeton, Carnegie-Mellon, Chicago, Columbia), and the rest from the Hebrew University and Tel-Aviv University; only one interviewee received a PhD from a minor university in the United States. Most interviewees presented their works at colloquia and conferences in the United States, published widely in the most respectable journals, refereed articles for various mainstream journals, and even joined their editorial boards. Moreover, several of them had taught at American universities before returning to Israel and still do so occasionally on sabbatical leaves. Many also work with American colleagues on joint projects. Of course, Israeli economists may have idiosyncratic characteristics, as economists in Illinois or Massachusetts might have. Yet we believe we can safely state that the epistemic culture in Israeli economics departments is fundamentally the same as in leading research universities in the United States.
The construction of the history of economics is in itself a controversial enterprise related to ongoing struggles among rival approaches. See Morgan and Rutherford, 1998, and Yonay, 1998, for accounts that differ from those commonly found in the history of economic thought. During the struggle with its rivals, what we call “mainstream economics” itself has been modified, changing its claims in response to attacks from the outside and absorbing elements of other schools that could fit into its network. We mention a few of these changes below, but it is impossible to describe them in detail here. Our study is therefore limited to recent years and to the localities studied by us, as explained below.
When two or three economists coauthor a paper, they often work separately, and when they really sit and work together, the presence of an observer would be too intrusive.
In most cases, we chose articles that were under review at the time of our research or were in final draft before submission. In a very few cases, we chose articles that had been completed a year or two before the interview.
“The dangers of relying on retrospective accounts . . . are well known: they can be expected to be, at best, edited, idealized, and streamlined, and at worst, distorted out of recognition” (Pickering and Stephanides, 1992:143–144). But as in Pickering and Stephanides' case, our goal is to understand a way of thinking, not to reconstruct how actual projects have evolved. For that purpose, how economists justify their past decisions is as relevant as the actual unfolding of events. For this reason, we do not think that confidentiality is a major issue here. We heard confidential stories, for example, on the dealings behind the refereeing process and what social endeavors might improve the likelihood of publications, but these stories—not unique to economics—are not relavant to our goal here.
Speaking on the community of health economists, Ashmore et al. (1989) claim that “each participant is able to formulate his or her own practice and the nature of health economics differently” (1989:185). We had a similar sense: our interviewees differed in their attitudes toward the status of economics, in their evaluations of future developments, in their beliefs in the potential of complex mathematical models, and in many other metatheoretical issues on which we intend to elaborate in future publications. Yet, Like Ashmore and his colleagues, we believe that it is possible to describe the whole field by identifying widespread themes and accepted practices. Furthermore, in this article we focus on what appears to us as a fundamental aspect of mainstream economics that is shared by the vast majority of our interviewees and by other informants, even though they formulate it differently when they are asked to describe it explicitly.
The quotations in this paragraph are taken from the draft we had read before the interview. All the following citations, which appear without references, are translated from our transcribed interview with Norman.
Named after the French economist Leon Walras, the father of the Lausanne school, and one of the pioneers of the “neoclassical revolution” of the 1870s, who envisioned a mathematical representation of all interconnected markets (Yonay, 1998:187).
For example, let us assume that the prices of a car of a certain quality are normally distributed within the range of $20,000–22,000. A dealer offers a consumer a car for $21,000. She now has three options: buy the car at this price, search for a lower price elsewhere, or to quit the search without buying any car.
All the following quotations, which lack references, are taken from our transcribed interview with Bental, also translated from Hebrew.
For many years, Robert Lucas was the Editor of the prestigious Journal of Political Economy; he was a Nobel Prize winner (1995) and one of the most influential figures in contemporary economics (Klamer, 1984:Chap. 2).
In such cases, banks would profit from fees charged for keeping the money in their safes.
This word, pronounced “motivatzia,” has entered modern colloquial Hebrew and is widely used in conversations among economists.
The colloquia we attended and transcribed during the first period of the research are referred to as Q1–Q22; those observed in the second period (2002–2004) are coded QQ1–QQ16.
A cursory reading of published articles in the top journals shows that our claim holds in regard to many of them as well.
For more on the history and philosophy of the overlapping generations, see Hausman, 1992:Chap. 7.
The assumption obviously applies in vegetables and fruits markets (although even there new technologies may extend products' longevity), and it is also true in the case of many other food products, of fashionable goods (e.g., clothes), and of high-tech components that rapidly become obsolete.
Behavioral economics is the fledgling subfield of economic theory that aims at replacing the common behavioral assumptions of self-interestedness and rationality with others that better fit experimental results (e.g., Camerer et al., 2004; Smith, 1989). We heard conflicting views about this line of research, and one of our interviewees abandoned it when he realized how hard it was to publish his work in this field (cf. McCloskey, 2000:12–16; Mirowski, 2002). Yet it is clear that this controversy, as well as the discussion of which concrete assumptions to introduce, is part of current mainstream economics. It is beyond our scope to enter these debates, but one thing is sure: behavioral economics is part of the epistemic culture delineated here, and everything we have said so far applies to its practice as well. The same is true about the neo-institutionalists: they add interesting assumptions about economic institutions, but the rules of the game are left unaltered (Rutherford, 1996).
To illustrate his point, he gave an example: if a certain result holds in 99.9% of the cases but under unique circumstances it does not, an analytical solution cannot be found, but practically, there is an answer that is good enough.
Significant changes in perspective might have occurred with the technical microfoundation revolution. Olivier Blanchard, a renowned MIT economist whom our informant mentioned as the leading spirit of this change, highlighted an important aspect of this transformation: “Until [the late 1970s], macroeconomic policy was seen in the same way as a complicated machine. Indeed, methods of optimal control, developed initially to control and guide rockets, were being increasingly used to design macroeconomic policy. . . . Economists no longer think this way. It has become clear that the economy is fundamentally different from a machine. Unlike a machine, the economy is composed of people and firms who try to anticipate what policymakers will do, who react not only to current policy but to expectations of future policy. In this sense, macroeconomic policy can be thought of as a game between policy makers and the economy. Thus when thinking about policy, what we need is not optimal control theory but rather game theory” (quoted in Warsh, 2004).
The notion of “applied economics” has undergone a change in economics itself. Once “applied economics” had the common meaning of studying the economic aspects of various social institutions, such as health, education, transportation, and so forth. Typically, those were empirical studies that measured demands, costs, consumers' decisions, and many other factors with the explicit intention of consulting with decision-makers to help them shape informed policies.
Many observers told us that the heyday of pure theory is behind us and that current economists are inclined to work more on concrete economic problems with simple models and to look for relevant empirical data. This assessment is supported by Colander's (2005) study of the changes in graduate economists' attitudes, but such statements should not mislead us: the discipline may shift from the more abstract to the more concrete, but this swing takes place in a field that continues to be characterized by its tendency to abstract modeling relative to other social sciences.
Interestingly, there are no sociological studies of econometrics or of similar statistical research in other social sciences, although these practices are more observable. Several researchers, however, have looked at the way econometric models of whole economies have been constructed and used for policymaking; see, for example, Evans, 1997, 1999; Hoover, 2001; van den Bogaard, 1999a,b. Although van den Bogaard talks about economic modeling, we should note that the econometric practices she is concerned with are very different from the theoretical modeling that we analyzed.
None of our interviewees hold such a position, and we have not found any support for it in our observations or in our numerous informal conversations with many economists.
An indication of this is the Noble prizes given to economic historians Robert Fogel and Douglas North in 1993, and to the experimentalists Veron Smith and Daniel Kahenman in 2002.
E. Roy Weintraub is an “insider,” who has attempted to expose the epistemic culture behind his practice. The hypothetical classroom conversation he creates (1985:Ch. 10) exposes many of the features discussed here.
The resemblance of economists to mathematicians and physicists is not a mere coincidence but the result of specific historical circumstances; see Mirowski, 2002.
Economic theory, perhaps like other theories in the human sciences, is not only a way to describe and explain realities detached from science; it is also part of the economic world, as actors perform economic theories—of various origins and styles—and enact them in their daily business. “Economics” is part of “the economy” (Callon, 2005).
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This article has gone through a long process of evolution, and it is impossible to remember all those who have helped in its creation. Participants in sociological colloquia, workshops, and seminars at the Hebrew University, University of Haifa, Princeton University, New York University, Technische Universität-Berlin, and Konstanz University, at economics colloquia and workshops at the University of Haifa, Tel-Aviv University, and Bernard College, New York, and in the Politics and Government Department at the Ben-Gurion University should all be thanked. Special thanks to the participants in the economic sociology/anthropology workshop at the University of Haifa and to Yuval Millo, Nathan Berg, and Tom Pessah.
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Yonay, Y., Breslau, D. Marketing Models: The Culture of Mathematical Economics. Sociol Forum 21, 345–386 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11206-006-9031-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11206-006-9031-5