Why do People Make Fun of Economists?1

When I was in graduate school I lived among a large cadre of economists and had little sense of how we were viewed by non-economists. Since I always had respect for people in other disciplines, I assumed that they had the same respect for me. But once I started teaching at small liberal arts colleges, I began to realize that this was not true. Several years ago my colleague Eleanor Brown, an Economic professor at Pomona College was voted an honorary non-member of the Economics department by the Women's Studies faculty. Many people seem to have little respect for economists. They like to tell economist jokes. For example, how many economists does it take to change a lightbulb? The answer is none. They just sit around in the dark waiting for the invisible hand to do it. Why do people make fun of us?

Over a hundred years ago Francis Walker, the first president of the American Economic Association wrote an article about the low esteem people held for political economists, what economists used to be called in those days. He thought it was because of our devotion to theoretical abstractions and our tendency to ignore the importance of customs, laws and institutions. But I mention this in order to raise a different point. Perhaps economists have always been unpopular, like tax collectors, because they always bring bad news. Politicians and ordinary people are often full of pet schemes like lowering taxes to reduce the budget deficit. They don't like being told that their schemes won't work, that they can't have their cake and eat it too, that there is no free lunch. Since this is a flattering view of the situations it is one which many economists would like to believe.

Of course this can not be the whole story. One common complaint is that economic forecasts are always wrong. You hear many jokes. An economist is a person who can tell you what is going to happen next month and then later explain why it didn't happen. Or if all the weathermen and economists in the country switched jobs, no one would ever know the difference.

Now at least since the time of King Arthur, national leaders have asked wizards to gaze into crystal balls to foresee the future. We would all like to know what the future holds, but forecasting is inherently an impossible task. The future state of economy will depend of whether or not there is another Gulf war, whether or not we have another drought, whether or not the Clinton Administration decides to lower capital gains taxes, etc. On all these questions your guess is probably as good as mine. So if economic forecasts using fancy econometric models are off the mark, please understand. In some sense forecasts of recessions can't be much more accurate than forecasts of earthquakes and military conflict.

But the most common complaint about economists is different. It is that we never agree. No matter what position you want to take, you can always find an economist to support you. There are more jokes. If you ask three economists a question you will get five different answers. Or as Reagan put it, there should be a Trivial Pursuit game for economists with 100 questions and 3000 answers. It is said that if all the economists in the world were laid end to end, they still wouldn't reach a conclusion. Or better yet, if all the economists in the world were laid end to end, it wouldn't be a bad idea. Before I discuss this I'd like to point out that this is not the whole story either.

On many issues economists are quite unanimous in their opinion. Societies benefit most from free trade. Rent control tends to destroy cities. The minimum wage creates teenage unemployment. The costs of unemployment outweigh the costs of inflation. The environment would be cleaner at less cost to society with a pollution tax. Does any of this make any difference?

For example, consider the Gramm-Rudman Act passed by Congress and signed by the President Reagan back in 1985. The bill provided a time table and a mechanism to reduce the federal budget deficit to zero by 1991. Nearly every professional economist in the country thought it was a brainless and gutless piece of legislation. Some economists may have favored the legislation, but only for cynical reasons. In the end the views of economists did not matter one bit. This was an example of an important principle, that politics always dominates economics. The senators and congressmen wanted to take a political stance and could not be bothered with economic logic. Thus economists can be unpopular even when they are nearly unanimous.

Then again, the complaints that economists never agree have some truth to them. On issues such as the effects of corporate income taxation, the proper enforcement of antitrust laws, the transmission mechanism of monetary policy, and in general the limits to markets, economists are split. Whatever position you take, you will be able to find a respectable economist to say that you are right. Why is that?

For one thing, economists do not know everything quite yet. While we are making progress, so far we only have a limited understanding of a very complicated economy. But there is always an inner drive to push against the frontiers of knowledge, to find answers to questions which are just beginning to be understood. And when students, other professors, relatives or your friendly financial journalist asks us questions about this or that, we don't want to say "I don't know" or "nobody can know" even when we really don't know. We have Ph.D.s and feel like we should know. And when the answers are faint, you tend to hear what you want to hear. Since there are left-of-center and right-of-center economists, just as there are left-of-center and right-of-center secretaries, we will tend to hear different things. 

Secondly, the answer to any complicated question has to depend on assumptions about the way the world works. Economists are always making assumptions. And so you hear jokes about them. There is the one about the group that ends up shipwrecked on a desert island with a some canned goods and no can opener. After the others have failed, the economist announces that she knows how to get the food. "Assume we have a can opener," she says. Now one has be very careful here. It is important to remember that the value of a theory can not be judged by the accuracy of its assumptions, only by how well it explains the real world. Furthermore, the only valid response to a silly assumption is a better assumption. There is no such thing as economics or any science without preconceptions about underlying behavior. People who do not outline their assumptions explicitly like economists have probably smuggled in an even sillier set of preconceptions.

And one final aspect of modern economics which frustrates people, even some economists, is that the field has become extremely technical. It is often difficult to distinguish an economics seminar from a mathematics seminar. Economists seem more comfortable speaking in differential calculus than in plain old English. Why is a subject about the daily life of each and every one of us so abstract, technical and obscure?

Let me begin by asking why economics shouldn't be at least as technical as physics for example? Explaining the behavior of millions of human beings must be at least as complicated as explaining the behavior of heavenly bodies in motion. And the use of everyday language may be a disadvantage when you are trying to be precise about everyday things. If you examine textbooks on economics written 100 years ago, they will be written in plain English and say many true things. But a modern textbook filled with figures, diagrams and equations conveys a much more powerful and complex apparatus for thinking about economic life.

I would even argue that economics should be more technical than physics. Physicists have plenty of data, so that they can follow their intuition secure in the knowledge that the experimental data will not let them wander too far astray from the truth. But economists have less hard data to work with, and must rely more on careful and rigorous thinking than on intuition.

On the other hand, and economists always have another hand2, there may be a down side to the technicality. Some people may have incentives to overdevelop the technical apparatus. First of all, if you are good at it, you will want to benefit from your comparative advantage. And it may be easier to invent small technical variations than to develop completely new ideas. Is this important? Perhaps. People who spend their lives making elaborate distinctions will come to believe that the distinctions are important. They may choose their assumptions for convenience instead of plausibility and then forget where the assumptions came from.

And yet, overall I think economists have done a pretty good job. The basic question of economics is how to best satisfy the unlimited wants and desires of a society given the limited available resources. Nobel laureate James Tobin made it perfectly clear to us in graduate school that the only reason for studying economics was to make society a better place to live. The best example of our success is that since Keynes, we have learned how to make our macroeconomy function much more smoothly than before. Here a picture is worth a thousand words. The graphs show how "much more stable real output has been in the United States under conscious policies of built-in and discretionary stabilization adopted since 1946 and particularly since 1961."3 Of course there is still a tremendous amount which we do not understand about the economy. But so far no one has found a better way of doing economics.

1. The thrust of these thoughts and any funny jokes have their origins in remarks by Nobel Laureate Robert Solow several years ago. All inaccuracies and failed attempts at humor are my own.
2. President Truman once wished that he had a one handed economist.
3. James Tobin, Asset Accumulation and Economic Activity, University of Chicago Press, 1980, p. 47.

Linus Yamane
Claremont, California
February 1992