The Sanders campaign is using a letter from “170 economists and financial experts” to good political effect. Amongst the Twitterati (and a few particularly credulous Kossacks) this letter has morphed into a statement by 170 “leading,” or “top,” or “prominent” economists, a sober expression of the consensus of the academy!
So just who are these experts, and how seriously should we take them?
As it happens, there is a way to assess that.
RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) is the central index of economics publications. It also produces a ranking of economists, based on things like their publications and their citations in the work of other economists. It is a highly reputable and utterly apolitical organization.
RePEc ranks the top 10% of US economists, a list of 947 scholars. The names near the top of the list are genuinely “prominent”– people like Andrei Shliefer (#1), Joseph Stiglitz (#4), Kenneth Rogoff (#7), and Paul Krugman (#17).
So how many of Sanders’ 170 make the list?
One.
That’s it. Just one. L. Randall Wray comes in at #477 (which, by the way, is a considerable accomplishment –“prominent” might overstate it, but it places him in the top 5% of all US economists).
Now, you might protest that women are badly underrepresented in this top 10% list, just as they are underrepresented in the discipline as a whole. To give Sanders some credit, 46 of his 170 (~27%) are women in a field where women account for just 19% of all publications.
As it happens, RePEc is conscious of the under-representation of women amongst professional economists, and so it provides a separate list of the top 10% of female economists in the world.
Not one of the women who signed Sanders’ letter make this list.
A close look shows that many of the 170 are young scholars: assistant professors, adjuncts, even a graduate student, still making their names. This already raises questions about whether they are “top” economists, but even here RePEc helps out, offering a ranking of the top 200 young economists in the world.
Not one of the 170 makes this list.
To return to my original question, who are these experts, and how seriously should we take them?
Sanders offers us a handful of genuinely important public figures, most notably Robert Reich and Dean Baker. They aren’t on the RePEc list because they aren’t publishing economists, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t treat them with respect. A handful of others on the list are important scholars in fields other than economics (the impressive Christine Desan, for example, is the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard).
But as for the balance of the list, there is no sense in which they are “top” or “prominent” or “leading.” This is not to denigrate their work, for many of them appear to be doing interesting research of real value. They are not leading scholars and they provide no sober expression of the consensus of the academy, but they, too, deserve respect.
What troubles me is the way that the Sanders campaign has used this letter: 170 economists and financial experts! 170!! Surely that is enough to lend legitimacy to any claim!
Of course this is just politics. If Sanders had said “Robert Reich and Dean Baker back my plan” it wouldn’t have made headlines, because everybody knows where Reich and Baker stand. If he had truthfully said that “a handful of prominent economists and financial experts, along with a whole bunch of obscure academics and financial planners back my plan” it might have made headlines, but not in the way that he wants. Instead he trumpets their status and the media uncritically echoes him.
Sanders’ representation of this letter is not a capital “L” Lie, but it is hardly the capital “T” Truth either. It is more like capital “O” Obfuscation. It is part-and-parcel of the same “all hat, no cattle” campaign that slaps the word “Plan” onto a vague vision statement that looks like it might have been a group project in a Marketing 101 class.
Rather than asking who did sign this letter, perhaps the better question to ask of Sanders and his supporters is, how come so many people did not sign it?
Why is it that only one of the top 947 economists in the United States signed?
Why is it that not one of the top 873 female economists in the world signed?
Why is it that not one of the top 200 young economists in the world signed?