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THE ECONOMIST AS SCIENTIST, ENGINEER, OR PLUMBER?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2021

Huei-Chun Su  and
David Colander
Huei-Chun Su*
Affiliation:
Huei-chun Su: Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford;
David Colander
Affiliation:
David Colander: Middlebury College.
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

Some well-known economists suggest that a good economist should act like an engineer, a surgeon, a dentist, or even a plumber. These metaphors are useful in helping economists reflect the nature of economics and their role in society. But which is the most sensible one? This paper argues that economists should be playing all these roles and more, because economics is not a single entity, and each entity has separate goals, methods, and boundaries. To take this multiplicity of roles into account, this paper argues that in addition to the traditional boundary that delineates the disciplinary domain of economics against other sciences, an overarching boundary between economic science and applied policy needs to be recognized. It then examines Esther Duflo’s “economist as plumber” metaphor and suggests that a better metaphor for Duflo’s purpose would be “general contractor,” a metaphor that, if accepted, would suggest radical change in training applied policy economists.

Type
Symposium: Economics and its Boundaries
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , June 2021 , pp. 297 - 312
Copyright
© The History of Economics Society, 2021

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Footnotes

The authors would like to thank the organizers and participants of the Charles Gide Workshop 2019 as well as the two anonymous referees for their comments. Huei-chun Su would also like to thank Eric Beinhocker for support of this work and Luis Valenzuela for his suggestions on an early version of this paper. Only the authors are responsible for the arguments here.

References

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