My friend and colleague Dan Klein has written a guest reply to my recent post on economists’ consensus.  Here’s Dan:

I was surprised to read Bryan’s words: “Compared to non-economists, economists enjoy an amazing consensus.” Bryan points to a 1996 survey administered to both a set of  economists and to a set of ordinary Americans. Yes, the economists agree with each other more than do the ordinary Americans, but not all that reliably. On the thirty-seven questions, the standard deviation of economists’ responses is greater than that of ordinary Americans on one-third of the questions (see Table 2 of the JLE paper by Bryan).

Yes, on some questions the economists’ standard deviation is much lower, such as on whether technology is beneficial (Q21) and whether the economy is in a state of depression, recession, stagnation, slow growth, or rapid growth (Q37). It isn’t surprising that economists agree more than ordinary Americans on questions such as these.

But when we talk about whether economists “enjoy” a consensus, we are naturally most concerned with the most important matters. We are concerned with important issues of public policy. And we are concerned with all important consequences, not just particular effects of particular mechanisms. If you asked a group of people who are trained to think about the particular effects of particular mechanisms, it should not surprise us that they agree more than those who are not so trained. The real issue is whether economists agree on the big questions and overall consequences. Do economists agree on the desirability of major policy reforms?

Fortunately, an abundance of data is available from surveys of economists (Whaples 2006 and supplement; Klein and Stern 2006; Whaples 2009; May, McGarvey, and Whaples 2012; Klein, Davis, and Hedengren 2013). Let’s look at the last of those just listed, the one that Bill Davis, Bob Figgins, and I designed and fielded in 2010 to economics professors, with 299 respondents. It asked about seventeen reforms, each reform ratcheting upward the restriction on individual liberty or the activism of a tax-funded government activity. The five-point scale was “support strongly,” “support, not strongly,” “neutral,” “oppose, not strongly,” “oppose strongly,” so lower-valued responses are more interventionist and higher more laissez-faire. Here are histograms on the seventeen questions:


Of the seventeen questions, the one on which economists most clearly show consensus is international trade. That histogram is what strong consensus looks like. But notice how few look like that. Consensus can be attributed to perhaps four: international trade, prostitution, immigration and abortion.

One might expect that a science about the welfare consequences of a policy would generate single-peakedness, even pronounced single-peakedness, as with the international trade question. After all, perfectly random responses would tend toward a uniform distribution. But notice that, in fact, many of the questions show a lack of single-peakedness.

And, yes, the four histograms with consensus lean on the laissez-faire side, which is another matter, and one that Bryan also perhaps sometimes overplays. Notice how on some issues the preponderance–if not quite strong enough to be dubbed a consensus–leans in the other direction.

Mind you, the questions are about a ratcheting upward in the intervention or activism. Besides speaking to the matter of consensus, the results on all seventeen questions speak to attitudes toward governmentalization. For example, only 49.3 percent of economics professors oppose increasing the minimum wage (for the data see “Histograms” here).

The survey also asked about voting, so we can see by how much the mean answer of economists who vote Democratic differs from that of those who vote Republican. In the following figure, blue = Democrats, and red = Republicans:

Sometimes the blue Democrat and red Republican bars are about the same height, but frequently they are quite different. The results relate to the recent paper by Roger Gordon and Gordon Dahl,  “Views among Economists: Professional Consensus or Point-Counterpoint?,” which spins consensus among the 41 economists selected, apparently by Anil Kashyap,
to be on the Chicago Booth IGM Panel as consensus among economists in general, and as a lack of ideological cleavage among economists. But the questions put to the IGM Panel
are often very uncontroversial. A Washington Post piece ironically titled “Economists Aren’t Politically Driven, Economists Report” explains that the panel’s ideological range runs from Emmanuel Saez to Robert Hall.

Finally, about Bryan’s speaking of economists enjoying a consensus, here are words from Bill Davis, Dave Hedengren, and me:

The economics profession exhibits greater ideological diversity than other fields (Klein and Stern 2005, 283-286). Is ideological diversity a good thing? The answer, for each of us, will depend on what sort of state of consensus the state of diversity is being compared to. Wherever one stands, one can imagine something worse than a lack of consensus.

I’ll reply to Dan later this week.