In the latest Quarterly Journal of Economics, the most prestigious economics journal by measured impact, there are twelve articles. Given its acceptance rate of just 3 percent, the Quarterly Journal’s articles represent the pinnacle of economics research. Surprisingly, in this recent issue, less than half are about economics. While titles like “Indebted Demand” and “Hall of Mirrors: Corporate Philanthropy and Strategic Advocacy” represent the type of research that is to be expected in a top economics journal, ones like “Concessions, Violence, and Indirect Rule: Evidence from the Congo Free State,” “Folklore,” and “Strict ID Laws Don’t Stop Voters: Evidence from a U.S. Nationwide Panel, 2008–2018” seem out of place there. While any of these topics are worthwhile, why are top economists working on sociology and political science?

After Paul Samuelson published his Foundations of Economic Analysis, economics increasingly became dominated by mathematics. Instead of tomes like Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy or The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money published by the previous generation, economists after Samuelson wrote much shorter and more data-driven texts stressing a particular ideological and mathematical framework. By doing so, they developed more and more sophisticated methods to prove their theories. From creating entirely new methods to improving upon old ones borrowed from medicine and psychology, the study of economics increasingly consisted of learning a variety of statistical methods and when to apply them to certain scenarios. Due to this focus on empirical methods rather than theory, the current generation of economists is highly capable of proving causality whenever a quasi-experimental situation arises.

While economists heavily use statistics to quantify observable phenomena, sociologists are more skeptical of them as an accurate way to understand the world. For example, while economists are happy with stating that a policy caused a drop in reported crimes, sociologists would be much more skeptical because the statistics could be massaged by the government agency that collected them or be distorted by structural bias. This relative skepticism toward statistics created an opportunity for economists to fill the void. Instead of sociologists attempting, as one article recently put it, to “fill in the gaps and expand upon a group’s ethnographic record” by focusing on things like political complexity, leading economists are doing so, using machine learning methods to demonstrate how certain traits in stories can predict cultural norms.

Although the study of folklore is fascinating and worthwhile, economists should consider the opportunity cost of not focusing more completely on the economy. If economists are not sufficiently studying the economy, society will be stuck with our current inadequate level of sophistication when it comes to policy. Monetary policy and taxation, among other economic matters, drastically affect the lives and well-being of entire nations.