Exciting economics is often misguided economics

IN THE long-running popular series about what’s wrong with economics, there is a new entry: Our profession is too insular.

“Economists generally agree that competition is good, and that markets with only a few dominant players are inefficient,” writes the economist David Deming in The Atlantic newspaper. “We may need to take a hard look in the mirror.”

Citing a new research paper by (naturally) four economists, which analyses almost 6,000 award-wining academics in 18 disciplines, he notes that the recipients of the major economics prizes, including the Nobel, “have collectively spent half their career at just eight universities: Harvard (where I teach), Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, the University of Chicago, Columbia and Berkeley”. This is a far higher level of concentration than other fields.