Pride and Prejudice: What’s good and bad about economics
Diane Coyle
Published: March 2003
Economics is one of the most powerful of intellectual disciplines, applying
enlightened scepticism to human society. Its analytical rigour often makes
economists unpopular, but that ought to be a source of pride. Unfortunately, we
are all too often our own worst enemies, as the formal study of economics has
taken the scientific method to an unproductive extreme that is vanishingly rare
even in the natural sciences. The most interesting research in economics now—
looking at history or geography or institutions or psychology—is steering away
from this reductive blind-alley, but there is a long way to go before economics
returns to its fruitful intellectual roots.