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This relative balance may be the key reason the public pays more attention to economists than to other social scientists: the field has meaningful debates. Keep this in mind the next time you hear, for example, that 80 percent of economists favor eliminating or cutting ethanol subsidies, that almost 90 percent advocate eliminating existing barriers to international trade, that 90 percent are against policies to restrict outsourcing of work to foreign countries, that by almost five to one economists believe that the typical Wal-Mart generates more benefits to society than costs, or that two-thirds of economists favor granting parents vouchers that can be used at any school, public or private. (I found these very results in two recent surveys.) Given the ideological diversity of economists, such instances of consensus are all the more impressive.
Ironically, these points of consensus have been reached mainly by using fairly simple economic models and straight-forward empirical evidence. Yet the whole point of graduate school is to learn how to come up with newer, cleverer models and statistical approaches—and, it seems, to look down one's nose at the low-brow economics taught in undergraduate textbooks. You thought that economics was all about Milton Friedman vs. John Maynard Keynes? Think again. Mundane issues like monetary and fiscal policy aren't abstract enough to attract much attention from graduate faculties and students. In fact, Colander's respondents explain that macroeconomics is in danger of losing its identity in the core of the graduate economics curriculum as it becomes merely "another subfield" of micro-economics. The payoff in economics is for novelty and cleverness. It's not just yesterday's headliners like Keynes and Friedman who are forgotten. The field is about articles, not once-important books like The General Theory or A Monetary History of the United States—and articles that are more than a decade old are often considered fossils. The incentives are to show that you are "smart," not necessarily that you are wise or learned.
To me the most intriguing part of the book is the student interviews. These budding economists come across as intelligent and candid, occasionally spoiled (fellowships and other opportunities can pay students up to $30,000 or so per year and tuition is waived), often overworked (many put in 70- to 80-hour workweeks: doing economics is the "default activity"), and frequently anxious. They know the rules of the game, and most are itching to turn into the professors who have shaped them. They know they aren't normal. As one survey respondent put it, "normal people solve crosswords; economists write papers (of which 80 percent are never read)."
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