A long read on one of my favorite topics, how economists are bad (and are an integral part of American-style 'big-government') May God Save Us From Economists
Reading just the first two paragraphs, looks like a shortened version of this book, which was a good read The Economists' Hour I bought but have not read this book, which may or may not counter Slouching Towards Utopia
Looks like he mention's Applebaum's book and distinguishes it. Will have to read the piece The Great Recession of 2007–2009 began an anti-Economism backlash that’s gathered strength over time. The critics include (to cite a partial list) mathematician David Orrell (Economyths, 2010); Harvard political scientist Michael Sandel (What Money Can’t Buy, 2012); British activists/economists Joe Earle, Cahal Moran, and Zach Ward-Perkins (The Econocracy, 2016); New York Times editorial writer Binyamin Appelbaum (The Economist’s Hour, 2019); John Maynard Keynes biographer Robert Skidelsky (What’s Wrong With Economics?, 2020); and, most recently, University of Michigan sociologist Elizabeth Popp Berman (Thinking Like an Economist, 2022). The issue has been discussed at length in academic and popular publications and in venues that previously exalted Economism. “The categories and the vocabulary of the market,” Leon Wieseltier, editor of Liberties journal, said at the Aspen Ideas Festival in 2014, “are being used in realms where they do not belong.”
I must admit I had to wonder how Mansfield was going to tie into this article and wondered if you had supplied an errant link. Couple of items of note in the article. One is people are irrational and even governments cannot control that. Two people take into account their surroundings which for the most part are demographic and economies of scale. This is where a one size fits all fails. Personally I'm more of Mises type that is based on Human Action.
I think what's 'rational' or 'irrational' is incredibly loaded and often self-serving, its one of the problems of the idea of reason itself. For example: Is it really rational to accept $3 instead of $0?
Depends on how hungry you are. Same can be said of the person that receives $10 and chooses to give nothing.
Economics, at its core, is the study of incentives and human behavior. It is reliant on certain assumptions, as are all fields. It is best to bring a variety of perspectives to most decisions, including other fields that have knowledge about human behavior, such as psychology, which come with different sets of assumptions and, at least at one time, methods. Economists should be touching most areas of government, because government is setting up systems in which human behavior and incentives are crucial pieces of knowledge. The article mentions the success of combining economic knowledge with environmental policy knowledge in the development of cap-and-trade as a regulatory measure. That is a pretty good example of how economists should be involved in decisions that are not directly about "the economy." That said, economists, and this is a generalization, involved in the creation of policy do need to do a better job of identifying and explaining their assumptions and testing the robustness of their conclusions to those assumptions, where possible. I feel that we have gotten better at this, but I think there is a lot more that can be done on this front.
