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 three out of four questions, more than half the panel takes the same side. That is to say, for only a quarter of questions there is no majority direction.
On the median question2, about 63% lean one way, 30% are uncertain, and only 7% lean the other way. 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 about 20% 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
Edit (2026-05-10): An earlier version of this post said the median question had “70% lean one way” with “30% uncertain and 9% disagree.” Those don’t add up — they sum to over 100% — because of a bug in how I aggregated across the percentile band (when uncertain was the leading bucket on a question, it was being counted twice). Corrected numbers: 63% lean / 30% uncertain / 7% opposing, summing to 100%. The “strongly agree” share among winners on the median question moved from 22% to about 20% under the same fix. I also tightened the headline figure: an earlier version said “four out of five questions” had a majority answer (80%), but that figure counted a question as a “majority answer” if any single bucket — including uncertain — exceeded 50%. The cleaner read is “more than half the panel takes the same side,” which is 72% / about three out of four. The qualitative point — uncertainty dominates active dissent — is unchanged and slightly stronger. Thanks to the reader who flagged it.