Diane Coyle's "Cogs and Monsters"

Diane Coyle is the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge and founded the consultancy Enlightenment Economics. Her books include GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History, The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as If the Future Matters, and The Soulful Science: What Economists Really Do and Why It Matters.

Coyle applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be, and she reported the following:

Page 99 [inset below left; click to enlarge] concerns my preoccupation with data - how are economic statistics constructed, and why are so many economists so uncurious about them despite the profession’s strong quantitative bias.

Page 99 would give only a partial view of the book as a whole. It’s a reflection on how economics needs to change, with three main arguments. One is that the profession is shockingly non-diverse, one of the worst academic disciplines for representation of women and people of colour, and this is intolerable in a social science: how can economists’ even know what questions to ask if there are so few with different experiences of life? A second is that the long tradition of arguing that economics is like engineering, dentistry or plumbing, seeking objective answers to well-defined problems, so that ‘positive’ economics can be separated from value judgements about questions like inequality, is fundamentally incorrect. Economists’ concept of ‘efficiency’ is itself value-laden, and economists cannot stand outside the society they analyse - although of course seeking to be as objective as possible, using evidence, is to be welcomed. (Page 99 concerns the quality of evidence.) The third argument is that the benchmark model from which economic reasoning starts is simply misleading in the modern economy of increasing returns, pervasive social influence on each others’ variable preferences, and network dynamics. Economic analysis should concern institutions and not focus on markets. The top academics know this, but it has not changed the basics, and the academic discipline concentrates on quantitative answers to narrow, well-defined problems, instead of tackling the big questions of today.

These are related issues. One reason the same kind of people keep selecting into studying economics is because it speaks to their experiences and preoccupations and not those of different groups. To caricature the top economics departments unfairly - because lots of great work is done by these academics - they have become like Silicon Valley bros. There are lots of parallels between the Econ and tech worlds, including His being coded as ‘homo economics’. But at least everyone is talking about AI ethics. This needs to happen in economics too, reviving political economy and rebooting welfare economics.

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The Page 69 Test: Diane Coyle's The Soulful Science.

The Page 99 Test: The Economics of Enough.

--Marshal Zeringue