I have a hypothesis that the trend in mainstream economics is toward an increased focus on Gender, Race, Inequality, and Climate. So I went to the home page of the American Economic Review, where you can look at the table of contents for past issues of the journal and also look at the table of contents of each, without being a member. I am a member, so I can see the actual articles, but for this purpose that was not necessary.
I checked out the “papers and proceedings” issue, which lists all of the sessions at the previous year’s annual convention that were selected for publication. Prior to 2018, this was always the May issue of the AER, but starting in 2018 this is broken out as a separate publication, called AEA Papers and Proceedings. Note that the annual meeting takes place right at the beginning of the year (it used to be right at the end of the preceding year). The sessions have to be planned well in advance, so for example it was difficult to arrange many sessions about the 2008 financial crisis in the 2009 meetings.
Looking at the titles of the sessions, I attempted to classify them as Gender, Race, Inequality, Climate, or all Other. This is somewhat subjective. Looking at some more recent session titles and using my best judgment, here is what I came up with:
| year | G | R | I | C | O |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2007 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 25 |
| 2008 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 23 |
| 2014 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 23 |
| 2015 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 1 | 25 |
| 2016 | 3 | 2 | 4 | 1 | 23 |
| 2017 | 3 | 0 | 4 | 1 | 26 |
| 2018 | 5 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 22 |
| 2019 | 5 | 1 | 6 | 0 | 21 |
Another approach is to do this at the level of papers, rather than sessions using the JEL classification codes as assigned by the authors. For any paper that is plausibly in the GRIC category, I looked at the paper description that includes the JEL codes. Those that include a JEL code of J16 or K38 would be in the G category, those that include a code of J15, J70, J71, J78, or J79 would be in the R category, etc.
An interesting contrast is between the papers in the May 2012 AER (meetings organized by Chris Sims) and the May 2013 AER (meetings organized by Claudia Goldin). In the table below, T stands for the total number of papers.
| type | 2012 | 2013 |
|---|---|---|
| G | 1 | 13 |
| R | 2 | 5 |
| I | 2 | 8 |
| C | 2 | 4 |
| T | 105 | 110 |
Note that I avoided double-counting. If a paper had both a J16 code (G) and a J15 code (R), I tried to pick the one that best fit the paper.
With the liberal Goldin, there were 30 GRIC papers out of 110. With Sims, who I assume is conservative, there were 7 out of 105. My guess is that we won’t see any more AEA meetings organized by conservatives.
Other notes:
–from 2005 through 2012, the number of GRIC papers ranged from a low of 7 to a high of 19; from 2013 through 2019, the number ranged from a low of 19 to a high of 41. The peak of 41 (36.9 percent of papers) was reached in 2018, meetings organized by Olivier Blanchard.
Perhaps more worrisome is that NIH appears to have biased its grant funding in that direction. Google search of NIH with combinations of gender, race, and inequality produces sufficient links to NIH documents to suggest that they are funding an entire sociology industry. Examples of how this money gets spent included here: https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/while-nih-failed-test-coronavirus-drugs-it-studied-drunk-monkeys-soap
Calling this trend an “increased focus” on certain “priorities” is being too kind. It is simply the expansion into economics of a worrying trend that has affected other areas of scientific inquiry (especially the behavioral and environmental) for decades now — and that is the deliberate corruption and replacement of genuine science by “gimme-ism.”
We were naive to think that this trend wouldn’t eventually expand into economics. My view is that the standards for publication and funding in these areas are lower than elsewhere. So what may have started as fringe research has now turned into a cascade. New economists are drawn to these areas because they are low effort, high payoff areas in terms of an academic career. I first became aware of this when colleagues started suggesting tweaks to research to include gender or race issues; the idea was that these tweaks would make the papers more publishable.
I would also argue that the proliferation of studies in gender, race, inequality, and climate has gone hand in hand with an increased focus on “policy relevance.” Or what can be perceived as academic, economic activist. At one point, economics was the study of markets and usually conceived of as positivist. It’s the opposite these days, where many editors want research with “policy relevance.” And authors are increasingly trying to tie “policy relevance” to research that is actually not on a policy relevant topic.
Why would inequality and climate be part of a “road to sociology”? Those seem like two topics that would be pretty squarely within the purview of economics, and not examples of economists using econometrics in a different academic discipline.
That’s not what “Road to Sociology” means. You’re thinking of “Economics Imperialism”.
“Road to Sociology” means: Just like the US was just a few weeks behind Italy in the deterioration of the general situation, the field of Economics is a few years behind Sociology in degenerating from a rigorous academic and scholarly discipline into an intellectual monoculture and a forum for progressive ideological advocacy and “policy-based evidence-making”.
Gender and Inequality seemed to have grown more than Race and Climate. More evidence that progressivism is becoming increasingly dominated by the sensibilities of educated, white women? I wonder what fraction of the Gender papers are about income/status/work-life-balance of women in the elite professions?
I am surprised that Climate has not really grown much. In general public political rhetoric, climate seems to be growing. Maybe, it’s because economists have already settled on carbon taxes and carbon permits as the solution?