Thus, economics, and economic theory, cannot be a "closed system. However, within the economics profession, the fashion was quite the opposite. Many economists, represented in the Public Interest volume by Mark Willes, thought that the problem with Keynesian economics was that it did not impute enough rationality to economic man.
Following Robert Lucas, Jr. Models that employed rational expectations also happened to be mathematically difficult; one of Lucas's most important papers appeared in the Journal of Economic Theory in There was considerable distance between the macroeconomic views of Willes and those of Arrow and Hahn, and even more distance from those of Paul Davidson, who represented the "post-Keynesian" further to the left school in the issue.
And yet nowhere in the volume is there a discussion of the issue of bias. Elsewhere, economists were becoming aware of the bias in macroeconomics. Robert Hall coined the term "freshwater economics vs. The two schools of thought had both different beliefs about how the economy works and different ideological predilections. Freshwater economists believed that attempts to control unemployment and output using monetary and fiscal policy were ineffective, and they also tended to believe in conservative economic policy.
Saltwater economists took the opposite view. However, neither would have admitted that their political inclinations had any effect on their beliefs about the effectiveness of discretionary fiscal and monetary policy. Regarding the question of testing procedures, the economics profession was roiled in that period by the "Lucas critique" as applied to macroeconometric models. In , Lucas argued that, under rational expectations, a model that had a robust statistical fit with the past could nonetheless break down completely going forward.
The Lucas critique grabbed the spotlight in the late s and beyond. However, another critique would prove to have greater significance. The econometric art as it is practiced at the computer terminal involves fitting many, perhaps thousands, of statistical models. One or several that the researcher finds pleasing are selected for reporting purposes. This searching for a model is often well intentioned, but there can be no doubt that such a specification search invalidates the traditional theories of inference.
When considering, for instance, whether private schools or public schools are more effective, the investigator can choose which factors to control for and how to specify the variables. In practice, each investigator iterates through many plausible choices before selecting the one to report. The economist behaves like an experimenter who is able to tweak the conditions of the experiment to obtain a desired result. This is not conducive to reliability.
All of these were serious challenges. But in , the most significant by far was the apparent failure of macroeconomics to provide a reliable means of predicting and directing the behavior of the economy. This was the essence of the crisis. As this is being written, a half-century after the Krupp volume, mathematical modeling is still the standard in the major economics journals.
But there is nothing like the same faith in higher mathematics that characterized the "peak math" era of the s. The five Clark medalists from published a total of four papers in Econometrica and none in the Journal of Economic Theory.
Economists no longer insist that homo economicus be modeled as rational. Instead, there is a popular field known as behavioral economics, which studies the biases and heuristics that affect individual decision-making and attempts to trace through the economic implications of these deviations from rationality.
Economists continue to preach the positivist ideal of scientific objectivity, without questioning whether it is achievable. However, the problems of bias are occasionally aired. Rather, Romer complained that some economists are producing biased theory in mathematical guise. The style that I am calling mathiness lets academic politics masquerade as science. Like mathematical theory, mathiness uses a mixture of words and symbols, but instead of making tight links, it leaves ample room for slippage between statements in natural versus formal language and between statements with theoretical as opposed to empirical content.
Recall from the Krupp volume the phrase "applicability theorem," meaning the manner of connecting the mathematical model to real-world observables. In physics, this process seems to be straightforward. But in economics, there is room for disagreement about the circumstances to which a mathematical model applies. Romer's view is that certain economists, primarily of the freshwater school, are guilty of abusing assumptions about how their equations connect with reality.
They make interpretations that suit their political biases, but otherwise their interpretations are not justified. He singles out Lucas, Prescott and a few others for having tenuous or sloppy links between mathematical elements and the real world. But from what I can see, such tenuous and sloppy links are the rule in macro fields.
There are two problems embedded in these mathiness critiques. One problem, emphasized by both Romer and Smith, is that theorists produce papers with what we might term false applicability theorems. That is, because the concepts or assumptions clearly do not relate to the real world, they produce insights that have no practical value.
The second problem, emphasized by Romer, is that the insights are not only inapplicable to the real world but are driven by personal biases of the authors, not by an attempt to arrive at scientific truth. Economists' testing procedures have changed dramatically in recent decades.
Rather than rely on multiple regression, economists often look for "natural experiments. This creates a "natural experiment," in which the students who were chosen in the lottery to attend a charter school can be compared to presumably similar students who participated in the lottery but were not chosen and therefore wound up in public schools.
In addition, some economists now use actual experiments. They put experimental subjects in situations that involve economic decision-making and test how subjects respond under varying experimental conditions.
This approach has been particularly helpful in behavioral economics, where it borrows key techniques from experimental psychology. Note, however, that neither actual experiments nor natural experiments are readily applicable to macroeconomics. The problem of arriving at reliable tests of macroeconomic hypotheses is still unsolved. Unlike in , however, macroeconomists today are fairly well satisfied with their field, in spite of or perhaps because of the inability to rigorously test their theories.
The "macro wars" of the s gave way to a consensus view that monetary policy could stabilize inflation, and that this in turn would limit the severity of recessions.
The Great Moderation that prevailed from the mids until appeared to confirm this view. Although this complacent consensus was clearly falsified by the deep recession and painfully slow recovery that followed the financial crisis, economists migrated fairly easily to a new consensus about this episode. In this view, the loss of wealth due to the collapse of housing prices caused households to sharply curtail spending at the same time that the extreme leverage of some major financial institutions and the tight interconnections among financial firms caused markets to "seize up" when investors lost confidence in mortgage securities, leading to widespread declines in the availability of credit.
The fact that short-term interest rates dropped to the "zero bound" in the wake of the crisis then forced policymakers to undertake creative steps to prop up demand, including "quantitative easing" by the Federal Reserve and the stimulus enacted early in the Obama administration. Had these steps not been taken, the crisis would have been far worse, with unemployment perhaps approaching the levels reached in the Great Depression.
We cannot re-run history without the stimulus and without quantitative easing. There is no way to test the claim that there would have been another Great Depression without those policies. But there are serious reasons for disputing this consensus explanation. In my own view, for instance, there is no simple monetary or fiscal solution to unemployment. Instead, I believe that unemployment results from the fragility of the intricate patterns of specialization and trade that emerge in the economy.
Sometimes, patterns of specialization that were profitable yesterday are not profitable today, and some people will be without jobs until new patterns can be discovered. In this view, the path that the economy took in and its aftermath was not decisively affected by fiscal and monetary policy. But my views are heterodox. Although economics is not now in a state of abject crisis, as it was in the late '70s, it is nonetheless likely to be entering a period of great change on all five of the disciplinary challenges we have been tracing.
First, there is reason to believe that in the coming years economists will reluctantly come to recognize the importance of mental-cultural factors as determinants of economic outcomes, reducing the power of mathematical modeling as an approach.
There is really no avoiding some movement in the direction of understanding economics as an interpretive discipline, a little like history. In trying to interpret the decline in labor-force participation of working-age males over the past two decades, or to understand the phenomenon of many retail firms offering special deals on "Black Friday," there is certainly some room to use mathematical models to aid the analysis.
But they are neither necessary for coming up with interpretations nor sufficient to render one interpretation superior to all others. In examining subjects like these, economists could greatly reduce their usage of mathematical expression without losing anything in terms of effective theory. In the Public Interest volume, Israel Kirzner wrote ,. Economic theory needs to be reconstructed so as to recognize at each stage the manner in which changes in external phenomena modify economic activity strictly through the filter of the human mind.
Economic consequences, that is, dare not be linked functionally and mechanically to external changes, as if the consequences emerge independently of the way in which the external changes are perceived, of the way in which these changes affect expectations, and of the way in which these changes are discovered at all.
Kirzner is a practitioner of "Austrian" economics, which was heterodox then and remains so now. But a number of "Austrian" ideas are likely to gradually penetrate the orthodoxy, particularly the emphasis on the role of non-material factors in affecting economic phenomena. Social scientists are inclined toward materialistic explanations. They want to explain economic phenomena on the basis of resource endowments and technical capacities.
They want to explain voting behavior on the basis of demographic and economic factors. The alternative to this materialistic reductionism is to say that ideas matter. It turns out that one cannot explain the tremendous rise in economic growth in the past two centuries on the basis of capital accumulation alone.
The remarkable gains in the standard of living have been mostly due to the development and application of new ideas for products and production methods.
Another non-material factor is cultural norms and social institutions. One cannot explain differences in wealth across countries simply on the basis of resources. It is not that South Korea is resource-rich relative to North Korea, or that Israel is resource-rich relative to its Arab neighbors.
South Korea and Israel have political and cultural institutions that are friendlier toward enterprise, and that is what accounts for their relatively strong economic performance. Economists prefer to examine people as individuals. However, individuals get their ideas mostly from other people. The world of mental phenomena is predominantly a cultural world. And these mental-cultural factors in social behavior make economics less deterministic and less individualistic than many economists would prefer it to be.
Like it or not, this reduces the advantage of mathematical modeling relative to verbal reasoning. Another reason to suppose that mathematical modeling will wane is the shifting media landscape. As of now, academic economists still must publish in journals to be successful, and these require mathematical modeling.
However, in the age of the internet, the print journal is a very inefficient forum for disseminating ideas. As economists increasingly make use of other forums, including social media, this may break the lock that print journals currently hold on career prospects. That in turn could facilitate more variety in the means of expression, breaking the monopoly currently held by mathematical modeling. Second, and very much related to the likely decline in the prominence of modeling, economists are likely also to reluctantly come to recognize that, because cultural factors matter, the simple model of the individual homo economicus has only limited applicability.
The biggest threat to the assumption of homo economicus is not alternative theories of individual psychology, such as those in behavioral economics. In fact, behavioral economics has been caught up in what in psychology is known as the "replication crisis. Economists will need to see economic decisions as embedded in cultural circumstances. In order to understand economic phenomena, we will have to pay attention to the role of beliefs and social norms. Because ideas and cultural context matter, there are many potential causal factors in economic phenomena.
Those curmudgeons who argued that economics is not a "closed system" were correct. It is up to each economist to choose which causal factors to study and which to ignore.
And this points to the third plausible development in economic theory. The prince is sick, and you've been summoned to help.
You call in two experts for advice. The first says: "Use leeches to suck out the evil humors. What's the right move? Well, in an ideal world, you would go and get patients who have illnesses similar to the prince's and give them all a variety of household substances, such as bread mold.
Then you would take careful note of who died and use statistical analysis to figure out which household substances cured disease. Thus, you would discover penicillin and invent modern medicine. Sadly, this is not what you do, because a if you proposed it, you would be led off to the dungeons and beheaded b it's the 14th century and you have no concept of the scientific method and c you don't really have the right tools for that experiment, anyway.
Instead, it's bleeding or leeches. So you take your best guess and you pray you're right. The economic situation we find ourselves in today is a little bit like the example above.
Everyone knows that it's a bad thing when factories sit gathering dust and potential workers sit idle on their couches. But the best "experts" that we have -- academic economists -- are in generally ill repute. Surveys have shown that the public has very little confidence in their predictions.
They argue bitterly on op-ed pages and can't seem to agree on the most basic issues. And of course, the recent high-profile debunking of the "90 percent debt-to-GDP danger zone" -- a talking point created by the famous economist duo of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, and used by many Republican supporters of austerity -- did nothing to help economists' reputations.
So are we making a mistake putting our faith in economics? Are economists themselves just charlatans, to be scorned as medieval cranks? Or for all their flaws, are they really the best experts we have? I don't have a definitive answer, just like there is no good answer to the problem of the Royal Physician. But having gone through an economics PhD, I do know a few things that I think the public should realize about the field.
To start, we need to talk briefly about what it is economic theorists do. Essentially, they make models, which are mathematical tools that are supposed to describe how the economy functions. The problem is that economists haven't really built a model of the whole economy that works.
A lot of smart people have spent a lot of time creating tools with names like "dynamic stochastic general equilibrium. Researchers in sociology, political science and science and technology studies agree on three conclusions. First, economists are most likely to be influential advisers in situations understood as technical, and in ill-defined situations where uncertainty forces policymakers to look for new solutions.
Second, the indirect influence of economics on policymaking is likely as important as the direct role of economists. The spread of economic discourse reshapes how non-economist policymakers understand a given issue. The spread of economists' technical tools determines the information available to policymakers and changes the process of decision-making. Third, meso-level social orders affect the political influence of economics.
Economists' actions in the political field must be understood in light of the dynamics of the semi-autonomous, globalizing professional field. Similarly, since the state itself is a collection of smaller organizations, organizational dynamics shape whether and how economists influence particular policy domains. These insights provide the starting point for a new research agenda. We attempt to provide a general framework for answering this question.
Our goal is not to explain why a particular set of economic arguments dominates in a particular time and place such as the late twentieth century victories of neoliberalism; see Mudge, ; Amable, , but to identify dynamics that mediate the ability of economists, their ideas and tools to influence policy in a variety of settings. The patterns we identify are based primarily on empirical studies of the USA and western Europe in the twentieth century, but we also address more briefly the extent to which they may apply to other parts of the world.
While economics is an increasingly global profession Fourcade, , its effects will always be mediated by local political institutions, and may vary in countries with strong indigenous economic traditions, like China and the former Soviet Bloc, and in those not governed by bureaucratized democratic systems. Our reformulation also takes seriously the problem of identifying what, exactly, we mean by economists.
Here, we are less concerned with definitional debates around the profession itself Fourcade, than with the level of aggregation relevant for analyses of policymaking: is it individual economists, or ideologically unified networks of economists, or the profession as a whole?
Or do we want to examine the influence of economic ideas, economic data or economic models? Each of the literatures we review answers these questions differently, and we map these differences without fully resolving them.
Our proposed agenda bifurcates the question. We identify three modes through which economists and economics can influence policy: professional authority, institutional position and cognitive infrastructure. We then suggest an analytical division of the question.
First, how are each of these achieved, and what role do economists play in the process? Second, once a change in professional authority, institutional position or cognitive infrastructure occurs, how does it then shape politics?
In the seventeenth century, there were no professional economists and no chairs of political economy at universities. By the mid-twentieth century, economics had become a prestigious and well-funded field of study, with departments at every major university, and was seen as possessing a useful and rigorous set of intellectual tools.
The professional authority of economics conditions the possibility of successful interventions in myriad ways. Here, the distinction between economists and policymakers collapses, and economists may be making policy decisions directly as well as giving advice to others.
Economists' institutional position at the helm of central banks in many countries, for example, means that they often have relatively free rein to determine monetary policy. At the transnational level, economists run organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which set the scope conditions within which national governments act Babb, ; Chwieroth, At a more local scale, a wide range of government agencies have some formal office devoted to economic analysis, which ensures the voice of economists is at least heard if not heeded.
Styles of reasoning Hacking, are similar to the core principles and ways of approaching problems that Reay identifies among US economists. While Reay focuses on economics PhDs, a soft version of the economic style of reasoning is widespread among policymakers, many of whom are exposed to it at law or policy schools Allison, ; Teles, The economic style can shape how policymakers approach problems, even if they ignore the specific recommendations of trained economists.
Economic policy devices cf. Muniesa et al. These include devices that produce information that helps us see the economic world, such as GDP, the inflation rate or the unemployment rate; and techniques that help with the process of making policy decisions, such as cost—benefit analysis, procedures for auctioning off the electromagnetic spectrum or guidelines for assessing when mergers are economically efficient.
Policy devices have received relatively little attention from scholars. Political scientists and sociologists have focused more on debates over prominent issues than the incorporation of tools into bureaucracies; science and technology studies STS scholars, on the other hand, have looked at how economists' devices affect markets rather than policy.
We review several literatures relevant to explaining how economists affect policy. From political science, we survey the ideas and politics literature and the epistemic community literature; from sociology, we examine the professions and expertise literature; and we look at multiple strands of research in STS. We build upon these to suggest that economists and economics can exercise policy influence by increasing their professional authority, acquiring positions of institutional power or reshaping the cognitive infrastructure of policymaking with their styles of reasoning or policy devices.
Since the s, political scientists and political sociologists have increasingly theorized the role of ideas in politics. This movement emerged out of the state-centred approach, which argued that state elites have an independent role in policy formation and are not simply mediators of class conflict Block, ; Evans et al. If state elites have interests and capacities independent of their class allies, then what those elites believe is causally relevant in explaining policy Weir and Skocpol, This literature emphasized the complexity and uncertainty of policymaking, and thus the need for ideas that could pare this down into a limited set of policy alternatives Kingdon, ; Hall, ; Blyth, Since then, much work has established that ideas matter, while remaining conflicted about exactly what ideas are and precisely how they matter Mehta, As Vivien Schmidt frames it, in some sense all policies are based on ideas.
While analysis often focuses on the interest group or professional community promoting a particular idea, the actor in this literature is really the idea itself Weir, ; Berman, ; Parsons, The point is to show, for example, how Keynesianism became dominant, not how Keynesians advanced their agenda.
Much work in this area has focused on how particular sets of ideas play out differently under local political, economic and social circumstances. Not only did Keynesianism have different degrees of influence in different countries to continue the example , but entirely different elements of it were implemented in, for example, Sweden when compared with Britain Hall, Later work on the global impact of neoliberal economic ideas has similarly emphasized the extent to which their adoption is shaped by national conditions Babb, ; Fourcade-Gourinchas and Babb, ; Ban and Blyth, This argument finds its culmination, perhaps, in Campbell and Pedersen's recent argument that the production of such ideas, as well as their impact, is nationally specific, and that paradigms more often evolve and co-exist rather than switching dramatically see also Schneiberg, Beyond its focus on the intersection of ideas, institutions and politics, this literature emphasizes three factors affecting when and how economists' ideas affect policy.
First, they matter because they construct political interests, which only make sense in light of individuals' ideas about how the world works Dobbin and Dowd, ; Blyth, ; Anderson, Second, the importance of economists' ideas fluctuates with the stability of the political situation.
During times of relative stability, ideas recede into the background. In times of crisis, uncertainty about the connection between a proposed policy and its likely outcome, and even the range of options available, opens up space for ideas to make a difference Blyth, Third, the factors affecting the success of economists' ideas vary at different levels of analysis.
Work by Hall and others Campbell, ; Lindvall, has suggested that changes in technical ideas—which policy instruments to use and at what settings—are more likely to be decided by experts, while shifts in policy paradigms are more likely to be determined by electoral politics.
Epistemic communities are networks of experts who share some set of beliefs. They have more ideological unity than a whole profession, and thus can strategically promote policies consistent with their beliefs. The literature is organized around identifying conditions under which epistemic communities are able to exert such influence.
While this literature does not focus specifically on epistemic communities of economists though see Ikenberry, , several of its findings seem likely to apply. Understanding neoliberalism, or any other set of beliefs shared by some subset of economists, as underlying an epistemic community, rather than representing an economic paradigm, offers a different route to tracing its policy influence. As is true for any interest group, the capability of an epistemic community to achieve policy change is a function of its resources, including support from other powerful actors e.
Thus, we should expect the policy influence of networks of economists holding shared beliefs to depend on what set of resources they are able to command. Epistemic communities are also more likely to be successful when advocating policies regarding issues around which policymakers have little knowledge and weak opinions.
Thus economists should have less direct influence on well-defined, highly public and partisan issues Ikenberry, , like, for example, tax policy Feldstein, And consistent with the ideas and politics literature, epistemic communities are more likely to have effects on the choice of policy instruments and their settings, and less likely to affect the actual objectives of policy Anderson, ; Lindvall, Both the ideas and politics and the epistemic community literature suggest that economists brandishing particular sets of ideas are best understood as just another interest group, though one that benefits from the resource of professional or scientific authority.
Economists' success will be determined by their ability to ally with powerful, resource-rich actors and by the favourability of political institutions and the historical moment to the ideas they are trying to advance. While this approach may be quite productive for explaining the role of ideas in shaping specific political outcomes, treating economists as just another interest group promoting one set of ideas or another tells us less about their distinctiveness from other such groups.
Although the literature on professions and expertise is based in sociology, not political science, it shares with the epistemic community literature a focus on particular groups organized around a shared body of knowledge. Since the s it has emphasized the question of how professionals gain and maintain control of the market for a particular set of tasks based on abstract knowledge Larson, ; Freidson, ; Abbott, More recently, a resurgence of scholarship on experts Eyal, ; Fourcade, ; Medvetz, ; Eyal, ; Stampnitzky, has also examined how professions produce knowledge, and to what effect.
The professions literature looks only tangentially at how experts influence policy. Steven Brint called in for analysis of the conditions under which professionals have more or less policy influence, but his call was not taken up systematically.
Our observations about how the professions influence policy are therefore inductive, rather than reflecting a clear consensus. We nevertheless identify several findings that seem likely to apply to the policy influence of economists as professionals. The Federal Reserve or the International Monetary Fund may spring to mind most quickly as examples of economists' policy influence. But research on the professions suggests that economists' greatest political effects might occur through indirect means and informal channels, rather than advisory positions and formal policy roles Brint, , p.
Experts are more important in defining problems and setting agendas O'Connor, ; Eyal et al. Economists are also likely to have the greatest level of influence when they can define some policy question as essentially technical Brint, , pp. This may allow them to convert technical authority into moral authority Kevles, ; Halliday, ; Bernstein, , or provide room for normative choices that remain invisible to non-experts, because they appear to be purely technical Jacob, ; O'Connor, ; Steensland, Conversely, and in line with the political science literature, the more overtly politicized an issue is, the less likely economists will independently influence policy outcomes, since incentives to challenge expert recommendations will be high Bernstein, Economists' actions in the policy domain must also be understood with reference to their professional domain, since the two are partially independent, but linked, ecologies Abbott, or fields Bourdieu, with their own rules and rewards.
Economists in the policy field may simultaneously be acting in the professional field, and their policy actions are likely to reflect the position of the professional field regarding what constitutes core, high-status or legitimate knowledge Breslau, ; Babb, ; Mudge and Vauchez, ; Reay, Finally, world polity theory Meyer et al.
Despite persistent national differences Fourcade, , the American model of economics has disseminated broadly, often displacing local forms of expertise Babb, ; Dezalay and Garth, ; Fourcade, Yet at the same time, this process often produces new, hybrid forms of knowledge Bockman and Eyal, ; Bockman, , particularly in countries with strong endogenous economic traditions, and its policy effects vary cross-nationally Dezalay and Garth, ; Fourcade-Gourinchas and Babb, ; Montecinos and Markoff, ; Ban and Blyth, A fourth approach, however, examines the role of sociotechnical tools.
Under the broad label of science studies, we include literature on performativity and the social studies of finance Callon, b ; Beunza and Stark, ; MacKenzie, , sociological literature on technical processes such as quantification, accounting and market design Carruthers and Espeland, ; Espeland and Stevens, ; Lampland, ; MacKenzie, ; Breslau, , and anthropological literature on expert discourses and their governance effects Ferguson, ; Miller and Rose, ; Scott, These share an interest in how sociotechnical tools—methods, measures and technical practices for producing knowledge—are assembled, stabilized, and have effects.
The science studies approaches assume that one cannot understand the effects of people or knowledge independently. Instead, stable patterns of relations among heterogeneous objects—people, knowledge, and the material world—constitute the actor with the potential to affect policy.
Riffing off of Callon et al. The effects of economists' tools are likely to be complex and unpredictable. This is highlighted across the literature, from the abject failure of the Thaba-Tseka livestock development project described by Ferguson to the unintended consequences of US prison sentencing reform discussed by Espeland and Vannebo , to the sequence of performativity and counterperformativity MacKenzie found at play as the Black—Scholes—Merton model was put to work in financial markets.
Economic knowledge, if accepted as authoritative, may also be performative, shaping the behaviour of those who are exposed to it Callon, a ; MacKenzie, ; MacKenzie and Millo, Markets, particularly financial markets, are probably the most fruitful sites for observing performativity.
But policy decisions can sometimes have performative effects as well. In response, telecommunications companies also hired game theorists, who helped the companies behave in the ways game theory expected Guala, ; Nik-Khah, The process through which economists establish policy devices is itself highly political Breslau, b ; Espeland, ; Evans, In the aforementioned FCC spectrum auctions, for example, experimental economists and game theorists each preferred to construct the auctions in ways that made sense within their epistemic community.
Groups such as telecommunications companies that stood to benefit from one method or another then aligned with and advocated for the experts whose knowledge supported their perceived interests Guala, ; Nik-Khah, Finally, economists' policy devices will have political, normative, cognitive and symbolic effects, but tend to conceal them Ashmore et al. They help determine which actors can legitimately intervene in a situation Breslau, b ; Espeland, , shape which policy options can be discussed Ferguson, ; Breslau, and shift discretion to different parties Espeland and Vannebo, We elaborate these points below.
Despite their common interest in how expert knowledge affects policy, these literatures locate agency in very different places, placing limits on how fully their insights can be synthesized. The epistemic community and professions literature both look at a group of people a professional group or an epistemic community that shares a body of knowledge.
The ideas of the ideas and politics literature and the sociotechnical tools of the science studies approaches have some similarities, in that both focus more on the effects of knowledge than the effects of humans. The latter, however, sees knowledge, people and material objects as inextricably bound together, and thus argues that the appropriate unit of analysis is this heterogeneous assemblage, rather than the ideas themselves. Some patterns, nevertheless, cut across two or more literatures.
Three empirical findings seem particularly strong. First, economists' policy recommendations are more likely to have effects under some conditions than others. In particular, economists will have a greater influence in situations that are ill-defined, including both situations of crisis Blyth, and moments early in the policy process, during the problem definition and agenda-setting phases Brint, ; Keller, This is a finding that holds across the ideas and politics and professions literatures, and seems likely to apply to a wide variety of political environments, given a government that is at least moderately bureaucratized.
They will also have more influence when they are able to define some policy question as essentially technical, and thus one that they are uniquely qualified to answer. This finding is particularly strong, holding across the ideas and politics Hall, , epistemic communities Ikenberry, ; Lindvall, and professions Halliday, ; Jacob, literatures, and also seems likely to apply in a range of bureaucratic contexts.
Thus, to understand the effects of economists on policy, one must understand how they establish certain domains as under their own jurisdiction and certain decisions as ones that require specialized expertise.
Second, despite the focus of both the ideas and politics and epistemic community literature on experts' advice, much of economists' influence is likely to occur through channels other than direct advising or policy decision-making. Paraphrasing Eyal , p. Several literatures suggest that what matters is not just which group of experts wins, but how their knowledge restructures politics as it becomes integrated into the policy process.
But at times it may alter institutional procedures, as when the US courts made economic efficiency the core goal of competition policy, to the exclusion of competing goals it had once also considered Eisner, Rarely can it be shown to matter at the level of realigning electoral politics, for example, though work like Mitchell does make the case that political consequences can be quite broad. The political implications of systems of measurement, calculation, evaluation and institutionalized knowledge production are explored most fully in the science studies literature Espeland, ; Evans, ; MacKenzie, ; Nik-Khah, ; MacKenzie, ; Breslau, , but also are consistent with work on the professions and the ideas and politics literature.
Similarly, discourses that originate within economics but then circulate beyond it also have political effects. Beyond the effects of specific concepts, looser arguments based on economic theories can reshape political dynamics Berman, , and the authority of economic knowledge can legitimate policy choices Breslau, More generally, work in the professions literature O'Connor, ; Eyal, ; Eyal et al.
Finally, multiple literature identify the importance of meso-level social orders—in particular, professional or disciplinary fields and organizations—in mediating the effects of economists on policy. From the professions literature in particular, we observe that the structure of the field of expertise shapes action in the policy field Abbott, ; Fourcade, ; Mudge and Vauchez,
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