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What if Sociologists Had as
Much Influence as Economists?
Economic View
By NEIL IRWIN
MARCH 17, 2017
121
Wren McDonald
Walk half a city block in downtown Washington, and there is a
good chance that you will pass an economist. People with
advanced training in the field shape policy on subjects as varied
as how health care is provided, broadcast licenses auctioned or
air pollution regulated.
Turn on cable news, and the guests who opine on the weighty
public policy questions of the day quite often have some title like
“chief economist” underneath their name. And there are
economists sprinkled throughout the government — there is an
entire council of them advising the president in most
administrations, if not yet in this one.
But as much as we love economics here — this column is named
Economic View, after all — there just may be a downside to this
one academic discipline having such primacy in shaping public
policy.
They say when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks
like a nail. And the risk is that when every policy adviser is an
economist, every problem looks like inadequate per-capita gross
domestic product.
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Another academic discipline may not have the ear of presidents
but may actually do a better job of explaining what has gone
wrong in large swaths of the United States and other advanced
nations in recent years.
Sociologists spend their careers trying to understand how
societies work. And some of the most pressing problems in big
chunks of the United States may show up in economic data as
low employment levels and stagnant wages but are also evident
in elevated rates of depression, drug addiction and premature
death. In other words, economics is only a piece of a broader,
societal problem. So maybe the people who study just that could
be worth listening to.
“Once economists have the ears of people in Washington, they
convince them that the only questions worth asking are the
questions that economists are equipped to answer,” said Michèle
Lamont, a Harvard sociologist and president of the American
Sociological Association. “That’s not to take anything away from
what they do. It’s just that many of the answers they give are
very partial.”
As a small corrective, I took a dive into some sociological
research with particular relevance to the biggest problems facing
communities in advanced countries today to understand what
kinds of lessons the field can offer. In 1967, Senator Walter
Mondale actually proposed a White House Council of Social
Advisers; he envisioned it as a counterpart to the wellentrenched Council of Economic Advisers. It was never created,
but if it had been, this is the sort of advice it might have been
giving recent presidents.
For starters, while economists tend to view a job as a
straightforward exchange of labor for money, a wide body of
sociological research shows how tied up work is with a sense of
purpose and identity.
“Wages are very important because of course they help people
live and provide for their families,” said Herbert Gans, an
emeritus professor of sociology at Columbia. “But what social
values can do is say that unemployment isn’t just losing wages,
it’s losing dignity and self-respect and a feeling of usefulness and
all the things that make human beings happy and able to
function.”
That seems to be doubly true in the United States. For example,
Ofer Sharone, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts,
Amherst, studied unemployed white-collar workers and found
that in the United States, his subjects viewed their ability to land
a job as a personal reflection of their self-worth rather than as
an arbitrary matter. They therefore took rejection hard, blaming
themselves and in many cases giving up looking for work. In
contrast, in Israel similar unemployed workers viewed getting a
job as more like winning a lottery, and were less discouraged by
rejection.
It seems plausible that this helps explain why so many
Americans who lost jobs in the 2008 recession have never
returned to the labor force despite an improved job market. Mr.
Sharone is working with career counselors to explore how to put
this finding to work to help the long-term unemployed.
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SEE SAMPLE
PRIVACY POLICY
Jennifer M. Silva of
Bucknell University has in
recent years studied young
working-class adults and
found a profound sense of
economic insecurity in
which the traditional
markers of reaching
adulthood — buying a
house, marrying, landing a
steady job — feel out of
reach.
Put those lessons together, and you may think that the economic
nostalgia that fueled Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign
was not so much about the loss of income from vanishing
manufacturing jobs. Rather, it may be that the industrial
economy offered blue-collar men a sense of identity and purpose
that the modern service economy doesn’t.
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Sociology also offers important lessons about poverty that
economics alone does not. “Evicted,” a much-heralded book by
the Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond, shows how the everpresent risk of losing a home breeds an insecurity and
despondency among poor Americans.
It works against the tendency to think about housing policy as
solely a matter of which subsidy goes to whom and what
incentives ought to be in place to encourage banks to lend in
poor neighborhoods. All that stuff is important, of course, but
doesn’t really address the overwhelming challenge of insecurity
that affects millions of people.
And a large body of sociological research touches on the idea of
stigmatization, including of the poor and of racial minorities. It
makes clear that there are harder problems to solve around
these issues than simply eliminating overt discrimination.
It’s one thing, for example, to outlaw housing discrimination
based on race. But if real estate agents and would-be home
sellers subtly shun minority buyers, the effect can be the same.
Professor Gans of Columbia has argued for decades that the
stigmatization of poor Americans fuels entrenched, persistent
poverty.
If the White House Council of Social Advisers did exist, one of
its great challenges would be to convert some of these findings
into actual policy proposals that might help. Part of the
ascendance of economics in the policy-making sphere comes
from the fact that economists tend to spend more time looking
at specific legislative or regulatory steps that could try to
improve conditions.
And trying to solve social problems is a more complex
undertaking than working to improve economic outcomes. It’s
relatively clear how a change in tax policy or an adjustment to
interest rates can make the economy grow faster or slower. It’s
less obvious what, if anything, government can do to change
forces that are driven by the human psyche.
But there is a risk that there is something of a vicious cycle at
work. “When no one asks us for advice, there’s no incentive to
become a policy field,” Professor Gans said.
It may be true that these lessons on identity and community
don’t lend themselves immediately to policy white papers and
five-point plans. But a deeper understanding of them sure could
help policy makers.
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A version of this article appears in print on March 19, 2017, on Page BU7 of the New York edition with the headline: Ask
a Sociologist to Fix the Economy. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe
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