A step towards rapprochement

Abstract

For a long time economics has been growing apart from the other social sciences. Economists have become steadily less and less interested in history, sociology, anthropology and political science, regarding them as lacking rigour in their methods and unable to generate reliable knowledge about the social world. Many economists became uninterested in any problem that could not be modelled mathematically, which ruled out most of the economic events which interested students, policy-makers and the general public. Some economics courses in the United States even refused to admit that the near-collapse of the financial system in 2007-8 required any attention from economists. As Robert Shiller points out, this was in sharp contrast to many earlier economists, including John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter, who used narratives and knowledge from other disciplines as part of their toolkit to explain complex economic events.