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Book Review: How ‘Hard’ is Economics?

By ‘Better Living’, the contributors to Professor John Siegfried’s volume refer to the way economics research has inflected public policy decisions resulting in growth and an increase in prosperity – in the majority of cases the focus here is on policy changes in the US. The volume begins with an overview written by Professor Charles Plott which enumerates the value-added of economic theory: economics research has given us a range of indispensable tools (game theory, cost-benefit analysis, the concept of human capital) and economically sensible public policy changes (scrapping the military draft, adopting broadly pro-immigration policies). Yet, despite this, the rather polemical introductory preamble accuses economists of failing to realise the contribution made by their own profession: the problem is that economists have internalised the general low level of recognition that blights their discipline. In the US, as Plott points out at the end of his overview chapter, graduate economics studies receive but a small fraction of the funding awarded to the ‘hard’ sciences: ‘In terms of benefits per dollar spent on research and [. . .] the marginal dollar spent on research, economics must be the most valuable of all sciences’. So if the problem is just that the government and general public underestimate how hard a science economics truly is, books like Better Living can correct that imbalance, make the case for better funding and make the world a better place in the process. Plott’s reference to federal funding of the ‘hard’ sciences is instructive for reasons I will come back to shortly. The injured tone of the opening pages quickly subsides as the overarching editorial concern with obtaining greater recognition for economics decomposes into twelve wide-ranging accounts of how thinking rationally about markets has changed society. Each of these contributions is paired with a critical response, the effect of which is often to better illustrate just how ‘economists are smart and well-intentioned people who could make the world a better place’ (p. 143) – indeed, the discipline as it is laid bare here comes across as most admirable when scholars strongly disagree about the best means to achieve societal wellbeing. Thus Nancy Folbre remonstrates with Rebecca Blank who assumes, in her contribution on Welfare-to-Work reforms of the 1990s, that market income is an adequate measure of family living standards; instead, Folbre insists, ‘one-half of all work activity takes place