Steve Levitt on the future of economics

It’s really, right now, I think the profession is very inward-looking. It’s rewarding people who do things that are seen as hard. It’s really blurring the lines between theory and empirics was structural in a way that it is an experiment that I personally don’t think has worked out very well. And so, I think that it’s not that, I mean, the great ideas you’re talking about like Black-Scholes are few and far between anyway. But the rewards are not there for people who have practical insights are not rewarded greatly in the profession. The rewards come to people who make innovations, theoretical innovations, right? Who come up with new techniques, who do hard stuff that other people can’t do. So, I think in that sense, economics is going to become, my prediction is that economics is going to become less and less relevant, more and more inwardly focused. And honestly, I wouldn’t be that surprised if economics ends up going the way of anthropology or sociology, which works prominent and thought to be very promising and important disciplines, but have fallen dramatically in their stature because they ended up being more arcane and more focused inwardly. So, I have a really bad feeling about the future of economics, and I don’t see an easy way to change it.”

That is from Jon Hartley’s podcast with him, transcript included.