This is actually an extremely complicated matter. I agree that Chicago still rules large swaths of the economics profession in the US. Also, it is increasingly taking over in large parts of Europe, although there are large areas that remain out of its reach and are resisting over there.
OTOH, the trend really is away from the straight line Chicago baloney in the US. Again, the Nobel prizes are clear indicators, not just the most recent one for Kahneman and Smith, but last year's for Akerlof, Stiglitz, and Spence. (For anybody interested in my more extended take on that one, see my paper on it in the January issue of the Review of Political Economy, lead article for the year).
Also, David Colander and Ric Holt and I are nearing completion of an interview book on all this entitled, _The Changing Face of Economics_. It should be available from University of Michigan Press a year from this September, if all goes well.
As regards what is happening in other disciplines, my impression is that it resembles a bit the situation in European economics. There has been a long effort by the Chicagoans, led by Gary Becker, to invade the other social science disciplines. There does appear to be a new resistance coming in some of them, with the economic sociology of people like Granovetter and Swedberg rather interesting and effective. The ones most under the sway of the worst of the economists appear to be the political scientists, perhaps because of a fascination with the most mindless types of game theory. But now many of the changes in economics for the better are coming indeed from influences from the more traditional varieties of these other disciplines. Barkley Rosser ----- Original Message ----- From: "Wojtek Sokolowski" <sokol at jhu.edu> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2003 9:15 AM Subject: RE: [lbo-talk] Economics drivel
> Barkley:
> > Behavioral economics clearly reflects a major
> > multidisciplinary input into econ, with elements coming
> > from psychology especially (what do people want and
> > how do they really behave?) as well as sociology and
> > philosophy and some other areas. The current grad
> > micro texts still do not talk about the endowment effect
> > or much of any of the rest of this stuff. Preferences are
> > C-infinity smooth, which is violated by the endowment
> > effect, and lots of other standard stuff goes out the
> > window once one takes the behavioral/experimental
> > stuff seriously.
>
> My impression is that this marriage of economics, psychology, and
> sociology is coming mostly from Europe, whereas here the Chicago school
> still rules, and 'economic sociology' or economic psychology' is popular
> mainly among sociologists and psychologists as well as the folks
> studying organizational behavior, nonprofit sector, path dependencies
> and the like. There seems to be a positivistic bias in the US, which
> dominates conventional economics, but political science, urban planning,
> and to a lesser degree psychology and sociology are also infested with
> it.
>
> Wojtek
>
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