Regular readers will know that I have spent quite a lot of time reading the literature in social psychology trying to understand how groups of scholars become crippled with the patterned behaviour that Irving Janis identified as Groupthink in his ground breaking study published in 1972. I feel that my own profession is dominated by this catastrophic syndrome, which has biased the policy scene towards destructive outcomes. However, even after some major calamities, which the mainstream economists were blind too (such as the GFC), the Groupthink is so entrenched and powerful that academic economists actively engage in purges of what they consider to be ‘fringe ideas’, which they dismiss as the equivalent of homeopathy (that is, witchcraft in their eyes). I read an example of this behaviour this week which indicates to me that we are a long way from seeing fundamental change in the academy which might restore the credibility of my profession in the public milieu. My advice to parents – keep your children away from studying economics!
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The early Groupthink reference is Janis, I.L. (1972) Victims of Groupthink, New York, Houghton Mifflin.<\/p>\n
He found that some communities of scholars develop a dominant culture, which provides its members which a sense of belonging and joint purpose but also renders them oblivious and hostile to new and superior ways of thinking.<\/p>\n
These communities develop what Irving Janis identified in 1972 to be \u2018Groupthink\u2019, which drives the \u2018mob-rule\u2019 that maintains discipline within paradigms. <\/p>\n
Groupthink is a \u201cmode of thinking people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members striving for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action\u201d (Janus, 1982: 9) and \u201crequires each member to avoid raising controversial issues\u201d (Janis, 1982: 12).<\/p>\n
It has also been defined as \u201ca pattern of thought characterized by self-deception, forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values and ethics\u201d (Merriam-Webster on-line dictionary).<\/p>\n
Groupthink becomes apparent to the outside world when there is a crisis or in Janis\u2019s words a \u2018fiasco\u2019.<\/p>\n
In this blog post – Fake surveys and Groupthink in the economics profession<\/a> (March 19, 2019) – I considered how the maisntream profession reinforce their mob rule through the misuse of survey data.<\/p>\n An academic discipline that falls into Groupthink becomes degenerative (in the terminology of Imre Lakatos) in that it systematically fails to match its theoretical and predictive framework with the reality around us.<\/p>\n It systematically fails to provide meaningful knowledge but hangs onto dominance through control of the narrative, through the power of the senior professors, through the control of research funding, control of publication editorial positions, control of promotion processes within the academy and control of who enters the academic hierarchy.<\/p>\n That control is insidious and powerful and mostly filters out aberrant voices.<\/p>\n In the scheme of things, I am a significant outlier in the profession given that I am a senior professor with a long record of attracting research funding.<\/p>\n If I ever get round to writing a memoir I will tell you how I was able to get around the Groupthink.<\/p>\n When I was a graduate student, a senior professor called me in and said: “Bill, you are very bright but you are becoming a pop sociologist”.<\/p>\n He was reading me the riot act.<\/p>\n It didn’t work.<\/p>\n My secret was that I was good at mathematics and mathematical statistics, which meant I could beat them at their own game while having plenty of time to read Marx!<\/p>\n Back to it.<\/p>\n If we were to assemble a report card on how well mainstream economics has performed in this period of increased insularity it would be a sorry story.<\/p>\n The grade FF would be given on all dimensions:<\/p>\n 1. Theoretical consistency – New Keynesian macroeconomics is ultimately not even macro – see my post – Mainstream macroeconomic fads \u2013 just a waste of time<\/a> (September 18, 2009). <\/p>\n Several components of mainstream theory (marginal productivity theory, capital theory to name two) are plain wrong and deliver inconsistent inference.<\/p>\n 2. Empirical accuracy – clearly FF. Mainstream economist failed to see the largest economic crisis in recent history (GFC) coming and considered even more financial market deregulation was in order.<\/p>\n 3. Relevance – counting angels on a pinhead is not at all relevant.<\/p>\n What prompted me to write today’s blog post was an Op Ed from two New Zealand economists which demonstrates how remote the mainstream of my profession is from reality – Fringe economics, like homeopathy, needs a dose of reality<\/a> (published May 23, 2023).<\/p>\n This remoteness is dangerous because of the power the mainstream profession holds in the public debate.<\/p>\n It also demonstrates how far alternative viewpoints have to go to change the narrative.<\/p>\n The article is certainly ‘hubristic’.<\/p>\n Its contention is that they can identify a gap between what NZ policy makers think and what academic economists want them to think.<\/p>\n They consider any economic approach other than the New Keynesian mathemetised GIGO appraoch to be equivalent to “homeopathy” – that is, voodoo junk not worthy of merit.<\/p>\n They report a “worrying” survey of members performed by the New Zealand Association of Economists which found that:<\/p>\n \nGovernment-employed economists who answered the survey tended to favour, or be uncertain about, fringe concepts such as doughnut economics, mission-based economics, and the circular economy, whereas academic economists tended to disagree or strongly disagree that these concepts improve economic policy analysis.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Their assessment is that the academic economists “do know what they’re talking about” and they conduct their work “rigorously” in a “technical” way (implying quality) in a consensual manner.<\/p>\n This appeal to consensus is a characteristic of Groupthink.<\/p>\n Conversely, they claim that fringe groups in economics – like doughnut economics – has influenced policy makers and may “have devastating effects as it can lead to policy recommendations not based on rigorous, scientific methods”.<\/p>\n Prominent New Keynesian, Olivier Blanchard summarised these “rigorous, scientific methods” in his August 2008 article \u2013 The State of Macro<\/a>.<\/p>\n He said economists follow:<\/p>\n \n… strict, haiku-like, rules \u2026 [the economics papers] \u2026 look very similar to each other in structure, and very different from the way they did thirty years ago …\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Graduate students are trained to follow these \u2018haiku-like\u2019 rules, that govern an economics paper\u2019s chance of publication success, which then determines academic ppointments, promotion, grant success, and other elevations of influence (becoming chief economist in IMF etc).<\/p>\n So we get a formulaic approach to publications in macroeconomics that goes something like this:<\/p>\n This is effectively what these so-called “rigorous, scientific methods” involve.<\/p>\n When I started economics after some study in mathematics I couldn’t believe how trivial the mathematical techniques being used by economists were.<\/p>\n Most students were non-plussed though because they were weak in the techniques and struggled.<\/p>\n The Op Ed claims that the survey that the NZ Association of Economists conducted proves that the “fringe ideas” in economics (like doughnut etc) are basically worthless and dangerous to deploy in a policy making setting.<\/p>\n The academic respondents, in particular, strongly disagreed that these fringe ideas had merit.<\/p>\n They claim that in policy circles many analysts are not trained in economics (that is, been indocrinated into the Groupthink) and so:<\/p>\n \nMany do not have the training to know when they are dealing with the economic equivalent of homeopathy.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Politicians are seduced by the equivalent of “bedroom stories” which means they follow poor advice and implement poor policy.<\/p>\n The Op Ed concludes that only mainstream economics can provide the ‘scientific’ basis for policy – because it provides “expert understanding” and allows us to “avoid costly mistakes”.<\/p>\n So there is Groupthink in action.<\/p>\n There is an element of ADHD involved here too – the poor darlings fear that some others will get the consultancies and the platform.<\/p>\n For what it is worth, I too have problems with ideas such as doughnut economics.<\/p>\n But only because it is incomplete and lacks a defensible macroeconomics.<\/p>\n But that just motivates the communication between Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) economists and the doughnut economists to broaden the analytical framework.<\/p>\n Which brings into highlight the next part of the story.<\/p>\n There are several research papers that analyse so-called citation analysis within the social sciences.<\/p>\n Citation analysis considers how often one academic discipline might cite other disciplines (in the social sciences).<\/p>\n For example, how often do sociologists in their written output include reference to, say, the research of psychologists, or political scientists.<\/p>\n A higher cross-citation rate is an indication of a broad, open approach to academic research, while a low count indicates insularity.<\/p>\n In a recent article – Patterns of interdisciplinary citations and asymmetry between economics and the neighboring social sciences from 1959 to 2018<\/a> (published 2022) – we read:<\/p>\n \nCitation analysis is a quantitative technique that answers for a bibliometric effort to understand how communication flows within a given scholarly network.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The social sciences are “a specific network of scholars, journals and academic departments” usually considered to comprise “anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, and sociology”, although social work is also cognate.<\/p>\n The evidence is particularly damning for economics which has the lowest cross citation record of all the social sciences.<\/p>\n They conclude that:<\/p>\n \n… knowledge exchange appears asymmetric, and economics is considered more insular than its neighboring disciplines … [researchers] … identify economics as the least interdisciplinary discipline in relation to other social sciences.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The extant research literature on this topic finds that:<\/p>\n 1. “economics is that, along with psychology … discipline had the lowest rates of interdisciplinary borrowing, the highest levels of intradisciplinary citations, and an insignificant number of citations from fellow social sciences.”<\/p>\n 2. “economics exhibited high levels of intradisciplinarity, engaging in an allegedly asymmetric citation exchange with other social sciences.”<\/p>\n The various academic journals where social scientists publish are able to be ranked for ‘openness’.<\/p>\n The main journals in economics score poorly.<\/p>\n Disciplines such as sociology and political science demonstrate a “high and growing interdisciplinarity”, which means they read and incorporate the findings of research outside their own disciplines within their own work.<\/p>\n Economics is low on this ranking which means there is an “asymmetry of knowledge transfer between economics and the social sciences”.<\/p>\n And, moreover, this is bad for the other social sciences because the Groupthink that cripples economics infiltrates the disciplines of political science and sociology and infests research in those areas with the fictions that mainstream economics perpetuate.<\/p>\n This has been labelled “economics imperialism” and a view among economists that the other social sciences are deficient unless they conduct their own work using “the tools of economics”.<\/p>\n The other point is that in the “first half of the 1900s”, economists were much more open to learning from and communicating with other disciplines.<\/p>\n In the 1960s and beyond, economics became “more and more hubristic” and “compartmentalized” in its approach.<\/p>\n This shift:<\/p>\n \ncoincides with the transformation of economics into a highly mathematical discipline, with a compulsion toward logical rigor … This resulted in the narrowing of economics\u2019 search for insights within other social sciences, as the discipline came to define itself more in terms of its methods than in terms of its subject matter … the upswing of a mainstream as strong as economics\u2019 generates a path dependence that hinders the search for alternative arguments both in the outskirts of economics itself and beyond its boundaries.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I discussed the way that mainstream economics has beomce a narrow exercise of formulaic GIGO in this blog post among others – The evidence from the sociologists against economic thinking is compelling<\/a> (November 12, 2019).<\/p>\n\n
Cross citation analysis<\/h2>\n