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[Foucaulf]

I wanted to go up to bat in this thread first, but turns out half of the posts here are ag's already. Too bad for me.

I'm not sure if all the authors cited in the OP are really focused on using economic jargon to everyday life. Levitt and Dubner's quote is about market implementation where the problem is diagnosed as not having enough markets. The Lesswrong people are more evo-psych than econ, with a bizarre belief that declaring yourself a Bayesian thinker will resolve intractable conflicts. Cowen actually thinks he's opposing Hanson (who falls with the Lesswrong people), and I think his book is really trying to embed economic concepts within common sense.

I specifically used "economic jargon" up there. The goal of high economic theory is to show how a small set of assumptions can fully characterize a class of observable trends. If theory is working well, people don't have to declare they're utility maximizers for economists to be right. Hell, someone who does abuse jargon like that is probably the kind of person who is refusing to negotiate the way a rational person should anyway.

As a social sciences student, I have realized how much the cancer of economic thinking has spread throughout this field of study. What I hate, more than the ideological framework in itself (which is an interesting perspective in itself), is the smug, self-satisfied and downright authoritarian belief held by its proponents that their economic rationality is the only rationality, that they got it all figured out, and that everybody else is just unable to see the truth because their judgment is clouded by silly things like norms and values ...

It's this delusion of grandeur that makes homo economicus theory one of the most dangerous ideas of the 21st century.

I'm sorry, Antonio, but please get off your high horse. Don't be so combative unless you can describe a set of norms that predicts annualized quaterly GDP growth within 0.3 percentage points.


EDIT:

So, Ag, while I'm sure they may not please you, do you have any links to behavioral economics studies that don't rely so heavily on mathematical symbols?

There is, very roughly speaking, two trends of research in behavioural econ: designing lab experiments that show evidence of people not following assumptions usually placed on behaviour, and building mathematical models that can account for that behaviour. The field can also be divided into psychologists who focuses on puzzles raised by lab experiments, versus economic theorists who wants to build better theory and is wading into the waters.

I want to say that Armin Falk is an accessible behavioural guy who still is a solid theorist. Kahneman is an experimental guy, while his coauthor Tversky wrote down models and simplified it for psychologists. Bob Shiller's a pundit in behavioural finance, but Richard Thaler started out writing some stuff on that too.

[Foucaulf]

You're missing the point. Nobody is attacking economists for doing their job as economists (I mean, there would be some legitimate criticism to voice against how some economists have been doing their job in the past 30 years, but that's besides the point). The problem is that a few economists - but also an awful lot of non-economists - have decided that the conceptual tools and theoretical framework of modern microeconomics can be applied to every social science, from sociology to politics, to psychology etc. Basically, you can do away with "subjective" notions like ideology or socialization and examine everything in terms of interest maximization, rational choice and game theory. That is a very dangerous trend.

These are dated arguments after what everyone else has said, but non-economists have been enamoured with grand theories of everything too: structuralism, racial anthropology, power structures, and Marxism (if you count that as non-economic). Nor are attempts by economists to venture into other fields always successful; most have failed, outside of maybe Chicago school work on education, the family and crime.

On the flip side, it's not as if non-economists are forbidden to say things about the market. In the aftermath of the crisis, some have done very well: Graeber the anthropologist, the psych wing of behavioural econ, international relations faculty, even a few critical theorists. By all means, these new entrants have been much more strident against econ than any economist since Friedman and Becker have toward their disciplines.

Economists branching out into fields shouldn't be taken as an insult on your honour. Isn't cross-pollination a good thing, one that will strengthen the influence of rigorous inquiry into human behaviour? Unless you actually name people who are so virulently against other disciplines and has professional clout, I'm not going to take your rhetoric seriously.

You could always say that economists are taking the good jobs, but I believe that's only because all other social scientists don't want to communicate their ideas to non-specialists.