Greg Mankiw's Blog: The Sociology of Economics
A reader sends this interesting letter:
Dear Professor Mankiw,
I'm a resident at one of the Harvard hospitals. In the past couple of years I've had the chance to attend a number of inter-disciplinary seminars where you have statisticians, physicians, sociologists, anthropologists, epidemiologists and economists present. I've been impressed with what your discipline has to say: in virtually every seminar the economists are able to say something useful. Without inflating your ego, I've also noticed that the economists present better papers and are less likely to be caught off-guard in a seminar. They are also more likely to discover problems in the work of others. I've been trying to educate myself on the economic way of thinking by reading your blog, Freakonomics, and now, by slowly reading your textbook. But clearly, there's no substitute to being formally trained as one.
My question to you doesn't concern economics, but more its sociology. So feel free to ignore this email. At the seminar that I attend most often, I've noted the following:
1. The economists are the most aggressive people in the room. They have little patience for introductions, motivation, or "being nice". They want to spend the first 10 minutes trying to figure out the -entire- talk. If they're not happy, they tend to disengage. I will note that they're like this with each other also. Why are things this way in economics? There must be pluses and minuses to this way of interacting.
2. The economists are the only social-scientists in the room that are willing to argue with the statisticians. This could be that you are a more argumentative lot in the absence of substance, but also that you know something. I'm not qualified to tell who wins these disputes, but the statisticians seem to regard the economists with a high degree of regard. Why do you think that different disciplines view the importance of statistics differently?
3. There seems to no love lost between the economists and other social-sciences. Some of this has to do with the nature of interferce in the two disciplines: your colleagues are always concerned about confounders. Other disciplines like "to tell a story"; confounders are certainly of concern to them, but the issues of bi-directional causality, and omitted variables seem of second-order importance to them. As a physician, I share your colleagues view of the importance of "selection bias" (nice term, incidentally). Why do you think that different disciplines weight the role of confounders differently? …
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