For generations people have hated economists, who seem to smile when delivering the bad news that there's no such thing as a free lunch. If you increase the minimum wage by X percent, they warn, Y percent of teen workers will lose their jobs. If you expand government subsidies to families without health insurance, like Scrooge they caution that millions will stop buying health insurance on their own and let taxpayers pick up the tab. If you cut interest rates to spur investment, you're liable to unleash the beast of inflation, they admonish.

At the same time many people stand in awe of economists. If a slew of economists sign a petition saying that some public policy will have a host of dire side effects, the media and even politicians are likely to pay attention. If sociologists, anthropologists or even psychologists were to do the same, it's possible that no one would take note. (The U.S. President has a Council of Economic Advisors but not a Council of Sociological Advisors.) If a survey says four out of five economists recommend a policy, it's almost like hearing that four out of five dentists recommend sugarless gum to their patients who chew gum.

Why do people pay attention to economists so much? Perhaps it's because economists deal with big, important things that people really care about—money, for instance—or because economists seem so analytical, unswayed by passion, letting empirical evidence and formal models answer questions for them. Rather than relying on gut feelings or using a lot of fuzzy adjectives, they tend to give precise magnitudes when they offer advice—and their tools seem to be pretty good at plausibly isolating cause and effect. Perhaps people pay attention simply because most economists are extremely smart. To receive a Ph.D. in economics you've got to earn a stratospherically high score on your gres, learn a lot of advanced math and statistics, and endure a gauntlet of grueling graduate courses. The hurdles to entering the profession are plainly daunting, and only obviously intelligent people with an immense amount of sheer mental stamina can clear them.

In The Making of an Economist, Redux, David Colander of Middlebury College takes a close look at how the nation's top economics graduate programs turn a select group of bright students into the analytical economists that society has come to hate, yet revere. The results will be of special interest to undergraduate students who are contemplating graduate work in economics. In fact, the book updates an earlier (1990) work that became must reading for those considering taking the plunge. But the volume also provides fascinating fare for the general reader. Colander proceeds by analyzing a survey administered to graduate students at seven top schools—Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale—comparing these results to an earlier survey and then sitting down with small groups of students to probe their experiences, attitudes, and observations in greater detail. The closing reflections include blunt observations on the process and profession by Colander; the widely respected macro-economist Robert Solow, a Nobel Laureate; and Arjo Klamer, a disgruntled "heterodox" critic of mainstream economics.

The first finding that may surprise many outsiders is that economists are not politically conservative—although they are far more conservative than other academic social scientists. Other social sciences implicitly (and in some cases explicitly) ban political conservatives from their ranks. If you admit to being a conservative or show the telltale signs, you will be actively dissuaded from entering these professions at many key steps, and your odds of getting an academic job will be slim. Economists don't engage in this form of abuse. Rather, as Colander puts it, the field's uncivil behavior is "mathematical hazing": setting needlessly high mathematical standards, lauding them, and using them to show off and to keep out less analytical thinkers. This hazing apparently favors neither political party, so graduate economics programs attract a spectrum of intellectuals, although they actually tilt to the left. Among the students surveyed by Colander, 48 percent consider themselves to be liberal, 24 percent moderate and 16 percent conservative. (Surveys of the political affiliations of professional economists show a similar range.) Colander finds that these students become more conservative as they progress through their graduate economics training—and are more politically conservative than their cohorts from two decades ago, who included a noticeable contingent of self-identified radicals.

This relative balance may be the key reason the public pays more attention to economists than to other social scientists: the field has meaningful debates. Keep this in mind the next time you hear, for example, that 80 percent of economists favor eliminating or cutting ethanol subsidies, that almost 90 percent advocate eliminating existing barriers to international trade, that 90 percent are against policies to restrict outsourcing of work to foreign countries, that by almost five to one economists believe that the typical Wal-Mart generates more benefits to society than costs, or that two-thirds of economists favor granting parents vouchers that can be used at any school, public or private. (I found these very results in two recent surveys.) Given the ideological diversity of economists, such instances of consensus are all the more impressive.

Ironically, these points of consensus have been reached mainly by using fairly simple economic models and straight-forward empirical evidence. Yet the whole point of graduate school is to learn how to come up with newer, cleverer models and statistical approaches—and, it seems, to look down one's nose at the low-brow economics taught in undergraduate textbooks. You thought that economics was all about Milton Friedman vs. John Maynard Keynes? Think again. Mundane issues like monetary and fiscal policy aren't abstract enough to attract much attention from graduate faculties and students. In fact, Colander's respondents explain that macroeconomics is in danger of losing its identity in the core of the graduate economics curriculum as it becomes merely "another subfield" of micro-economics. The payoff in economics is for novelty and cleverness. It's not just yesterday's headliners like Keynes and Friedman who are forgotten. The field is about articles, not once-important books like The General Theory or A Monetary History of the United States—and articles that are more than a decade old are often considered fossils. The incentives are to show that you are "smart," not necessarily that you are wise or learned.

To me the most intriguing part of the book is the student interviews. These budding economists come across as intelligent and candid, occasionally spoiled (fellowships and other opportunities can pay students up to $30,000 or so per year and tuition is waived), often overworked (many put in 70- to 80-hour workweeks: doing economics is the "default activity"), and frequently anxious. They know the rules of the game, and most are itching to turn into the professors who have shaped them. They know they aren't normal. As one survey respondent put it, "normal people solve crosswords; economists write papers (of which 80 percent are never read)."

One of Colander's chief laments is that graduate training produces economists whose capacity to use their judgment is underdeveloped. Still, he isn't as pessimistic as he was two decades ago, seeing many signs that graduate training has become less focused on disconnected, rarefied economic theory and more empirically grounded. But this leads to another important worry. It appears that the glue which has traditionally held the field together—Marshallian or Walrasian microeconomic price theory—matters less and less now, as the field turns into a branch of applied statistics.

The economist in me wonders how many readers of Books & Culture will read or even skim The Making of an Economist, Redux, no matter how much it has to offer the interested outsider. For all but a tiny handful, I suspect, the expected benefits of reading it will be far too low to overcome the huge opportunity cost. To read Colander's book you'd have to give up reading one of the other fascinating books reviewed in this issue. Then there are all those classics that have been lingering on your to-do list for years, the ones that "every intelligent person should read before they die"—like Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.

Well, it turns out that there may be little point in reading Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Marx, Mill, Marshall, Veblen, Keynes, Robinson, Hayek, Arrow, or Friedman. After all, graduate students in economics haven't read them—or even heard of all of them, it seems. When Colander asks a group of MIT students whether their courses include any discussion of Keynes, the response is … laughter. This appears to be the division of labor in society today: Economists write narrow technical papers, with mathematical models outsiders cannot penetrate and empirical estimates that educated laymen must take on faith. At best non-economists can read the abstracts to these articles and glean a little understanding. However, the task of thinking about the big economic questions is left for everyone else (including a few economists over age fifty).

Robert Whaples, professor of economics at Wake Forest University, is director and book review editor for EH.Net, which provides electronic services for economic historians.

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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