unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

481. The Science and Philosophy of Economics with Erik Angner

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Episode notes

How do economics play into solving major global issues like pandemics, climate change, or inequality?

Erik Angner is a professor of philosophy at Stockholm University and the author of How Economics Can Save the World: Simple Ideas to Solve Our Biggest Problems. He’s a rare kind of philosopher of science – while most focus on natural sciences, Erik studies social sciences like economics. 

In this episode, Erik and Greg discuss why philosophers have not given more attention to social sciences, how economics is not just a discipline but a methodology, and why economists should be more involved when it comes to solving the world’s issues. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

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Why don’t people recognize the consensus in economics?

45:42: There's a real sort of illiteracy when it comes to economics. We see it in policy questions. We also see it on the private level. So, overwhelmingly, if you ask people questions about interest rates and inflation or whatever, across the world, like, large shares of the population don't understand these concepts, and what that means is that majorities of the population don't have the skills required to make the kind of decisions that they have to make as a citizen of a modern rich country in terms of like choosing mortgages, choosing credit cards, saving for the future, planning for retirement, and so on. We have a system now that requires people to make decisions they're not equipped to make, and that strikes me as a massive problem that we really ought to be doing something about. And it's connected because if people learned more about one, they would maybe learn more about the other.

How does interdisciplinary research drive economic progress?

21:01: There's something interesting that happens when you come from another discipline into economics or whatever: you notice blind spots—you bring your own blind spots. But they might be corrected, and then you begin to see opportunities for progress that people within the community might not have seen.

Why economics can’t ignore values

07:44: For the longest time, economists imagined that they could proceed without any sort of attention to values. The thought was that economics is a science, that science requires us to ignore values, and that to the extent that values enter into our work, the work is thereby deficient in some way. But that picture is gone. It's gone, broadly speaking, in the philosophy of science, and economists themselves have come to appreciate that we have to engage with values in order to do the kind of work that we need to do as economists. [08:48] To the extent that economists are building things and designing things—designing markets and institutions and auctions and retirement systems and healthcare systems and all sorts of things—we sort of have to begin with a picture of the end goal. What are we trying to build here? What do we want our healthcare system to look like? And that's a question of values. You can't pretend that that's something you can settle by means of data alone.