The economics of economists: institutional setting, individual incentives, and future prospects, edited by Alessandro Lanteri, and Jack Vromen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, 374 pp.

Review of The economics of economists: institutional setting, individual incentives, and future prospects, edited by Alessandro Lanteri, and Jack Vromen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, 374 pp.It is distressing these days to be a book reviewer. And no, I am not bemoaning the fact that no one under the age of 40 reads books anymore, due to having the attention span of a cocker spaniel after having spent their life surfing the Web. Rather, it seems that publishers do not care anymore to constrain the titles of books to have any bearing on the actual topics covered therein. Here-case in point-one might reasonably expect to find a gaggle of economists applying microeconomics to the behavior of economists, perhaps to praise the rational virtues of that most sagacious of agents, the model of a modern economist. That is what I expected when I agreed to review it. But no: what we have here is a jumble of disjoint exercises attempting to conduct a scattershot armchair sociology of economics, almost exclusively carried out by economists who have little time for or background in real sociology. If I wanted to sample a random selection of people spouting off on what is wrong with economics, I could always just turn to Google or the Real world economics review or blogs such as Nakedcapitalism. It is not clear to me why these particular papers warranted being collected together between these covers, lumbered with its misleading title, especially since so many of them had been published elsewhere previously.Let me try to make the point about sociology in a terse manner. The only article in the book which really sets out to explain the shape of the modern economics profession is the superb chapter by a real sociologist, Marion Fourcade. That chapter, along with some more recent work, presents a plausible account of the global rise to power of the modern economics profession, in conjunction with the extraordinary intellectual contempt for other social sciences and parochial standards of argument so characteristic of its members. Fourcade adopts a comparative approach to the structures of epistemic authority and power, founded on data relevant to her thesis, as captured by this table from her paper "The superiority of economists" (Fourcade, et al. 2014).As one can observe, there is something different about American economists: they are more likely to disparage neighboring fields, and much more likely to enjoy an overweening confidence in their own epistemic legitimacy. After the global crisis, this really is quite extraordinary, and deserves to be a subject of inquiry. But what we find instead in the current book is further exemplification of that very hubris and insularity: various economists light upon some random aspect of their profession, and proceed to 'explain' it using the folk sociology of the natives. They ignore the work of people like Fourcade, as if she were not right there, in the book. Standards of evidence are lax; the big interesting questions are mostly evaded. And by this, I do not mean that they do not conform to a few stylized standards of hypothesis testing; rather, in most cases they write as though the economics profession were not embedded in the larger predicament of the modern university, nor reveal any interest in the more general sociology of knowledge.I do not usually do this, but I am going to list the authors and topics, just to provide some feeling for how tone-deaf many of these contributions are. Arjo Klamer suggests that economists do not behave like self-interested agents, because they are really engaged in some sort of Habermasian ideal speech community. Perhaps things are different where he lives. Margit Osterloh and Bruno Frey list some 'disadvantages' of academic rankings in economics, hinting that it is encouraged by some modern regime of New Public Management. They seem oblivious to the large literature which traces the imposition of metrics in the modern university to the neoliberal imposition of stunted notions of 'competition' and 'quality' as a prelude to a marketplace of ideas, often spearheaded by economists. …