Forbes: Finally, Economists Acknowledge That They're Biased
... It’s striking that so many economists have praised his [Tyler Cowen] op-ed: usually, economists (with much reason) point to how their conclusions are dispassionate, fact-based and (quasi) scientific as evidence for their validity. You would think that Cowen’s conclusion that most economists are not just disembodied scientists but that their values also influence their work would make them uncomfortable. In debates around topics like free trade, critics argue that economists’ social perspective tars their recommendation, and economists vigorously deny the existence of an “economics ideology”. In my view, the fact that so many economists praise Cowen’s finding which undermines economics’ claim to scientific knowledge highlights that many of these economists think their value system is, well, right. Their cri de coeur endorses a view of economics-as-it-is-practiced as not just a science but also a political ideology. “We are good”, economists hear this op-ed as telling them, not “We are biased.” ...
... Let me give you two examples of what I mean, two examples that I think are revealing (and, not coincidentally, hobby horses of mine).
The college wage premium vs the marriage wage premium. In contemporary societies, there is a strong college wage premium. That is to say, people who go to college make more money on average than people who don’t. While a minority of economists (including Cowen) have questioned why this premium should exist, the majority of economists generally take the existence of this college wage premium to mean that college is good and important, that more people should go to college, and that public policy has some role to play in promoting and subsidizing college attendance. I would bet a goodly sum of money that if you picked at random ten tenured economists from top-20 economics departments, and asked them to list what an 18-year-old should do to increase his chances of getting high wages, a majority would say “go to college.”
There also exists a marriage wage premium, which is roughly as significant and as consistent as the college wage premium. To say that the marriage wage premium doesn’t get the same amount of attention is an understatement. Economists recoil at the idea of praising marriage and supporting public policies that increase marriage. They are much more likely to dismiss the marriage wage premium as reflecting selection bias (it’s not that marriage makes people earn more money, it’s that people who would have earned more money anyway tend to get married) or intone that “correlation is not causation”–criticisms that apply equally to analyses of the college wage premium. I would bet a goodly sum of money that if you picked at random ten tenured economists from top-20 economics departments, and asked them to list what an 18-year-old should do to increase his chances of getting high wages, none of them would say “get married and stay married”–even though the data on the marriage wage premium supports this conclusion to the same extent as it does going to college.
The perspective of economists seems as good an explanation for this discrepancy as any. Economics as a profession, pretty much by definition, self-selects people who on the whole enjoy higher education. Economists by and large enjoyed college so much they decided to stay there for the rest of their professional lives. Encouraging other people to do as they did feels natural. They “know” that not everyone is like them, that selection bias advises caution on this issue, etc. but they’re human like everyone else. When the data can be read as supporting A and non-A, it’s our gut (whether consciously or not) which tells us which is right. (As I once put it on Twitter: thank God for confirmation bias, otherwise we’d never know when correlation is causation.)
Meanwhile, economists’ “cosmopolitan perspective” (as Cowen puts it) makes them not feel good at the idea of public policy that would interfere with personal choices (allowing for a second that getting married is a “personal choice” in a way that going to college isn’t). Most economists think that government should not interfere or have a stance one way or another with decisions that feel intimate to people. That is a complete value judgement. And it’s a completely defensible one.
But at the level of the economics profession, this leads to bias: much more ink is spilled on, and thought given to the college wage premium than the marriage wage premium. One is mostly praised and interpreted in a certain way, while the other is mostly ignored. And, of course, the thing that academic economics focuses on has an effect on elite debate and public policy, especially when the socially liberal, pro-higher ed biases of economists line up well with those of the rest of the elite. ...
... To clarify: my point here isn’t “I’m right, economists are wrong” or, worse, “No need to evaluate economists’ arguments on the merits, because they’re biased anyway.” And by the way, yes, I am a practicing Catholic and a social conservative, so my pro-marriage, pro-natality views have plenty of bias too. My point here is to praise Tyler Cowen for recognizing that economists have bias, and to note that fellow economists have cheered him for doing so. It’s a great step for intellectual honesty. Let’s be even more honest, and let’s have economists who are willing to look beyond their biases. I’ve suggested two places to start. I’m sure there are more.
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