Economists agree on more than you think

A popular view of the economics profession, as one with oscillating, or perhaps no consensus, is summarized by Harry Truman’s supposed quip that he wanted a one handed economist, because they kept saying “on one hand …but on the other…”. On the other hand, other critics say that academic and professional economists have too much consensus with Paul Romer alleging that economics has a “persistent equilibrium in which many economists are afraid to publish things that they believe to be true”.

I argue that neither of these is true. When we poll elite economists on their views on salient policy questions, on most questions they have a consensus, but with low confidence in it.

The University of Chicago’s Initiative on Global Markets polls a panel of elite American economists¹ on salient policy questions every few weeks. Imagine them in a room. On about four out of five questions, there is a majority answer. That is to say, for only a fifth of questions there is no majority answer.

On the median question² about 70% lean one way. But of the others, 30% are uncertain and only 9% disagree. Most economists who aren’t part of the majority don’t disagree, they just don’t have a view. This complicates the view that economists don’t have a point of view. They do have a view for the majority of questions the panel asks!

Second, convictions when held, are weak. On the median question, only 22% of those who side with the majority say that they do so “strongly”. Most of them only merely “agree” with the top answer, undermining the idea that there is a strong consensus that resembles groupthink. Even on the top 5% questions where economists are the most sure³, 40% of them still say they merely agree. This is true even for questions where the academic consensus is exceptionally strong like whether the average investor can beat the market.

The chart below plots all 629 questions by strength of consensus. A few familiar examples are labeled to give a sense of the scale.

So, what can we draw from this? My conclusion is that economists have a point of view, but it isn’t a strong one. Both caricatures of the economic profession, that they are either hopelessly divided or marching arm in arm are wrong.

Code and data: github.com/pradyuprasad/igm-consensus · huggingface.co/datasets/pradyuprasad/igm-consensus