[lbo-talk] Larry Summers on the academic hiearchy

ulisse mangialaio ulisse_mangialaio at yahoo.it
Fri Feb 17 09:41:37 PST 2006


the full quote gives a pretty meaning to the wisecrack, as i understand it:

"An Indian born economist once explained his personal theory of reincarnation to his graduate economics class," Paul Krugman writes in the opening paragraph of his Preface to Peddling Prosperity. "'If you are a good economist, a virtuous economist,' he said, 'you are reborn as a physicist. But if you are an evil, wicked economist, you are reborn as a sociologist.'" Krugman then continues, "A sociologist might say that this quote shows what is wrong with economists: they want a subject that is fundamentally about human beings to have the mathematical certainty of the hard sciences . . . . But good economists know that the speaker was talking about something else entirely: the sheer difficulty of the subject. Economics is harder than physics; luckily it is not quite as hard as sociology." ( 1994:xi)

Ulisse

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