Why is Economics Trending Toward Sociology?

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.

Why Socialism Doesn’t “Suck”

Campus conservatives often spout the phrase “socialism sucks.” But it’s almost never explained. If you are lucky, you will hear these pundits mention economic efficiency or freedom, but they hardly examine the root causes of why younger people increasingly support socialism. Organizations that peddle such trite slogans as “socialism sucks” usually slap those words on a t-shirt and sell it for $30 to bright-eyed conservatives looking to challenge the predominantly liberal discourse on their college campuses. It’s not much better outside of the campus bubble. While those on the religious right point to a God-shaped hole in the hearts of younger generations, mainstream Republicans obsess over Cuba and Venezuela rather than look at the countries actually idealized by American socialists (such as Norway and France) or analyze why the young are enamored with socialism.

Simply put, younger people are trending socialist because America is and likely will be worse for them than it has been for their parents. Suicide, drug overdoses, and housing prices are all rising while life expectancy, mental health, and real wages are declining. These issues disproportionately affect the generations that must over-leverage themselves in order to have the same material quality of life as the previous generation. Never mind that people in this new generation will have fewer friends, suffer heightened racial tensions, and feel the looming threat of climate change hovering over them. Frankly, socialism may provide a better solution than the nebulous, often unrewarding principles of market equilibrium and classical growth that the free- market conservatives espouse. Instead of merely hoping that housing prices will return to equilibrium without zoning laws, the socialist wants to create green, mixed-use neighborhoods with ample public transportation.

If you saw someone overdosed, homeless, and alone beside a perfectly clean corporate office, who would you empathize with? It is impossible to walk around a modern city without witnessing obscene human degradation. As the socialist sees it, this scene is an implicit threat to the working class: if you do not have your entry-level job that requires three years of experience manipulating pointless spreadsheets and meticulously constructing PowerPoints, that could be you. The socialists reject economic efficiency in their pursuit of equality. They do not care that their envisioned system doesn’t reach market equilibrium, because they see the market equilibrium as unequal and therefore unjust. The younger generations strive to enact the economic policies that they see in almost every European country, and why should they not? With innovation on the decline and social strife rising, our political system must adapt to an economic paradigm of low growth. We can either attempt to reboot our economy or accept our stagnant future and support those who are left behind.

After acknowledging that the youth are indeed likely to be worse off than their parents, we can see why they may be drawn to socialism rather than capitalism. They also harbor substantial resentment toward the older generations that valued short-term growth and enjoyment, leaving us with an untenable economic ponzi scheme and an environment on the brink of collapse. These emotions are channeled into ideas like heavily taxing the rich and agendas like the Green New Deal. Regardless of whether you think those ideas will better society or not, their motivation stems from real problems that the opposing side too often ignores in favor of abstract principles. When the system is not working for you, you want it to change -- and corporate capitalism is not working for the younger generations, now that the economic pie is not growing. Although a utopian solution is impossible, any step that alleviates the increasingly harsh aspects of modern life will seem like a step in the right direction.

To move beyond the “socialism sucks” paradigm, conservatives need to adopt a message of principled action rather than pure principles. Instead of adhering to the dogma of Ronald Reagan, worshiping free-market principles and posing a now-amorphous communism as our enemy, we need to embrace actionable ideas. We must resist the urge to bask in America’s former glory and seeming security, and focus instead on the future. If we want American manufacturing to come back, we must create a tariff system, provide subsidies, and encourage research and development rather than focus on lowering taxes for firms that are already using sophisticated tax-avoidance strategies. If we want our cities to be clean and free of crime, we need to enforce the law, but also address the underlying problems that cause social decay. The power of the state, which is not diminishing anytime soon, should be used to move toward and maintain a society that is more moral, more beautiful, and better acknowledges human dignity, rather than a structure that seems to have failed when Gross Domestic Product increases by only 2 instead of 3 percent.

The Harm of Excessive Safety

Throughout the pandemic, the American public experienced a new uproar in the culture of excessive safety. Safety is something to strive for, but excessive rules and regulations that diminish life are incredibly harmful, especially if they do little or no good. We take risks every day, and instead of pretending to eliminate them with what has been called “security theater,” we should inform people and let them make their own informed decisions. Consider speed limits on the highway. We could drastically reduce the fatality of car accidents, while cutting gas consumption and encouraging more people to take public transportation, by lowering the speed limit to 30 miles per hour. We do not implement such a law because it would drastically reduce the quality of life and would not be followed.

 We see a similar situation in the pandemic. There is a lot of inherent risk in communal housing, in-person classes, and socializing with our peers as these arbitrary rules that no one follows lord over us. Even something as simple as social distancing -- the most important rule for fighting the virus, and necessary in order for masking to be effective -- is not followed. Desks may be separated by six feet, and we may have dots littered on the floor to create a perfect Voronoi diagram. Yet we still pretend that everything is normal when we grab our food or party with our “cohorts.” We performatively police each other’s behaviors, while making exceptions for our own. Nobody truly follows the rules. The gain is slight, and those who are especially worried or vulnerable can feel free to take extra precautions and ask their friends to do the same.  Instead of pretending that we follow the guidelines, we should accept that the cost they impose on us is not worth the gain. If the cost were worth it, we would be following the guidelines and even taking extra measures. 

 Professors and high-risk individuals have now been vaccinated. People who get COVID-19 will experience very mild symptoms, and those who suspect they are high-risk can take extra precautions. We do not eliminate peanuts from the dining hall because a few have deadly allergies to them. We simply label the food, and the people with allergies carry around EpiPens. Because of our remarkable testing regime, we can quantify the level of COVID risk that each of us is exposing ourselves to and adjust appropriately. (Thankfully, it seems that the college administration understands this, because the violation they take most seriously is missing tests for the virus.) That means we could have full classes, a normal dining hall, and an end to the blue Adirondack chairs which supposedly decrease the spread significantly more than a table or regular furniture. We could end the semester without the isolation, and anxiety, that comes with the inconsistent enforcement of these rules.

Democracy as Default

In our current political culture, democracy is often hailed with uncountable accolades for its genius across a wide range of situations (though this praise often withers away when people don’t like someone who was elected). However, at the time of our founding, democracy was referred to only in a pejorative way. Each founding father could have pointed to the ancient world’s democracies and pontificated on the tyranny of the masses’ unrefined (ignorant, thoughtless, or excessively selfish) will and the factionalization of the public. Democracy could also be seen as a necessary evil, a way to understand the will of the people, without being considered a good way to govern. Such views of democracy have declined over time, and now it is praised and viewed as the default system of governance.

The problems of the unrefined will and factionalization are prominently displayed in the current state of the Democratic primaries. From the first debate on, the supposedly informed voters who are most likely to watch have been subjected to non-stop pandering, petty insults, and bickering meant to energize a hodge-podge of demographic and ideological groups for candidates trying to eke out a narrow plurality. Reaching a consensus is irrelevant in a democracy. What matters more is who can buy the most ads, or make the most promises to a public in which simplistic instinct and prejudice are sometimes much too rampant.

The commonsensical belief in affordable health care, minimizing student debt, and racial equality are contorted into Medicare for All, cancellation of student debt, and reparations. There is clearly a need for something to be done, but policies resulting from fickle passions are rarely effective.

In contentious times, democracy’s advocates often point to the “miracle of aggregation,” the idea that the choices of uninformed voters are essentially random and thus don’t affect election results in any particular direction, meaning elections are decided by the more-informed. Although this can be true when the issues at hand are unemotional, many uninformed voters are animated by a particular issue that affects them personally. How can we blame them? Most Americans do not have the time to inform themselves on which candidate has the most effective policies or to weigh their various flaws. We all want to make our lives better, but we are all victims of fanaticism and fallacies.

People who acknowledge democracy’s flaws often fall back on the famous notion espoused by Winston Churchill: “democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” This notion, though, fails to apply to the everyday lives of Americans. From local government to the lengthy faculty meeting, the unrefined will of the majority of those who actually attend triumphs over or subverts the original agendas put forward. Our ever-shortening attention spans have created a chaotic environment where fads and a shallow rationalism dominate while experience, history, and tradition are laughed at. In situations where populists have to convince only a small number of people to vote for them or their ideas, the baby is often thrown out with the bath water.

Instead of using democracy as a way to find solutions, we should use it more as a way to find problems: to identify the long-term issues we care most about. Elected officials and leaders of organizations should be insulated from the short-term buffeting of public opinion and should be in office for long enough to effectively implement necessary but unpopular decisions. For some organizations, this would be achieved most effectively by appointed leaders; it would be undemocratic but effective. And as citizens, we need to focus more on the problems and less on the solutions. There should still be democracy in our American system, but its current ubiquity has troubling consequences. A longer-term approach to fixing our nation's problems would set the stage for difficult but vital changes to our system.