Is the 'Dismal Science' dying out?: Why no one listens to economists any more
Brendan Shaw
"Even if you laid all economists end to end, they would still not reach a conclusion."
Attributed to Oscar Wilde, author, but debated.
"What we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science."
Thomas Carlyle, essayist, 1849
"I think people have had enough of experts."
Michael Gove, then UK Government minister and 'Leave' campaigner, 2016
"One profession has perhaps been hit worse than most by the populist wave of distrust that continues to wash over academic experts and decision-making elites: economists."
Editorial Board, Financial Times, 30 August 2025.
"Why did no one see it coming?”
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II's question to the London School of Economics about the Global Financial Crisis, 4 November 2008
The discipline of economics is going through an existential identity crisis at the moment. Increasingly, no one wants to listen to economists anymore.
And, look, let's face it. Economists have usually never been the life of the party.
As an economically trained person, I can say this. I trained as an economist myself. I spent years of my professional career jumping in and out of the discipline. I applied the various skills, techniques and mindsets that you pick up from formal training and years of experience to a myriad of policy and business problems.
But I am one of the first to admit that economists have an image problem.
It's been observed more and more that the world's policy agenda and issues have shifted from what economists have advocated.
No one is listening any more
How did it get to this?
It's true that the world has shifted from a few decades ago.
Let's face it, economists usually were never the most popular people. But pesky global issues have somewhat rained on the clean, neat ideological parade of the economics profession.
Where once economists might have been respected, sagely commentators people listened to - even if the people didn't necessarily like them - real world global events have got in the way. The Global Financial Crisis, the hollowing out of industries in high-income countries, globalisation, mismanagement of developing country debt crises, and austerity programs in debt-burdened countries haven't exactly won plaudits for economists from the general populace around the world.
Part of the problem is that what economists were prescribing - or what people thought economists were prescribing - was increasingly divorced from the real world.
During the 1980s and 1990s, the economics discipline went through one of its periodic ideological and/or theoretical battles. The generally free market, neoclassical-based theory of economics which argued that open, free competitive markets with little government intervention served society the best generally became the dominant theoretical/ideological framework in the discipline.
I say theoretical/ideological with some deliberate ambiguity because there is an intellectual debate about the extent to which this was theory or ideology, or a bit of both. However, that's for discussion at another time.
There was a period where the broader discipline of economics was dominated by a set piece theoretical framework centred around the operation of free markets as the norm. This was backed up by a theoretical, mathematics-based mindset that aspired for economics to be more like a natural science, rather than a way to understand human behaviour with all its foibles.
It failed.
Real world events got in the way of all this. Politics, society, history, imperfection and human frailty got in the way, and economists didn't read the room.
The truth is that not even all economists agreed with the formulaic neoclassical approach spelled out above. Hell, I spent most of my professional economics career running away from it. I did this partly because I didn't believe it, partly because politics, history, business, environmental issues and society's problems were more interesting to explore and work in, and partly because I didn't like people avoiding me at parties when I told them I was an economist.
Even in the late 20th century I had a pastime collecting jokes about economists because of my rising scepticism of the discipline:
What do you call a busload of economists going over a cliff with 3 empty seats? Economic waste.
How do you define an economist? Someone who can forecast the past.
etc, etc.
You get the idea.
So where is economics as a disciple now at?
It's got so bad now, that the discipline is pretty much in the dumpster, from what I can tell.
Economics as a discipline is undergoing fundamental challenge because, arguably, it has failed to explain and help manage some of the most fundamental structural changes happening in the world.
The effects of globalisation, de-industrialisation of regions in some countries, the rise of populism, the return of tariffs and protectionism, national sovereignty and the breakdown of the international rules-based order (as it was so defined) are all issues that the established economic orthodoxy failed to address.
The reasons for this failure are many and varied. In brief, the mainstream economics discipline ignored many of the social, political, historical, psychological and value-based factors that make humanity the rich, varied and imperfect tapestry that it is.
That's the short version. The long version is for a discussion or a lecture over dinner at another time.
There are many examples of this failure. Here's just a few:
Even before the Brexit vote in 2016, there were many economic forecasts to show that the United Kingdom leaving the European Union was going to have a negative impact on the UK's growth projections. It has turned out to be exactly thus. The problem in this case wasn't that the economists were wrong, rather that they just couldn't convince enough people of the likely outcome until it became apparent much later.
The Global Financial Crisis - most economists didn't see it coming in part because the financial markets had all been deregulated and were operating more or less as mainstream neoclassical economic theory said they should. This meant there was not enough looking at the evidence of what was happening and not enough value-based evaluation of whether how they were operating was right.
Economists have, to their credit, increasingly recognised the economic imperative to introduce carbon pricing as the most efficient way to address climate change - one of the major existential issues facing humanity and the planet - but have to date done a lousy job of addressing the politics of the issue and explaining it.
China's industrial policy-driven rise - many mainstream economists, particularly in Western countries, are still scratching their heads wondering how China's rapid industrialisation has occurred and tried to explain it just by assuming that it was open trade and markets. They haven't realised, or haven't been prepared to accept, that it was partly due to China's adoption of a long-term industrial policy strategy - in part a continuation of the 'East Asian Miracle' industrial policy model a range of other East Asian economies adopted with varying levels of success in the past.
I could go on, but you get the idea.
As Robert Lighthizer, former US Trade Representative, said: "Economists have been wrong about everything." Whether you agree with him or not, he articulates the problem the discipline has today.
The truth is, that there was never really a consensus within the economics discipline, it's just that some of the renegade elements of it that were critiquing some of its perspectives and recommendations ended up going into other disciplines.
And that's exactly what young students are doing today. Enrolments in economics university courses have plummeted, with young people preferring to study courses they feel are more relevant to the real world. Mainstream economics has become such a dry, theoretical, mathematical abstraction at a time when the real world is going through a whole series of ruptures, that people are looking for answers elsewhere.
As one commentator put it, economists themselves are facing a recession. Demand for economists and for economics has fallen off a cliff.
What to do about it?
There's actually two questions here:
Should we do anything about this malaise? and
If so, what should we do about it?
For my mind, the answer to the first question is 'yes'. Not because we need to preserve the discipline of economics per se, but because the problems the world and its people are facing will be better informed by having more research and understanding about how our modern day economies do and don't function.
The answer to the second question is more tricky. My suggestion is that economics needs to get better at understanding the poltiics, the history, the societies and the environment that operates in and around economies. Historically, the discipline has tried to weed out these perspectives in the interests of developing a 'pure' science, with the result today that no one believes it helps.
The discipline also needs to shed some of its, frankly, intellectual arrogance. The belief that humans operate in an atomistic world, that institutions, values, mindsets and history don't matter, that economics is a perfect science, and that there is some universal truth in how economic solutions are developed needs to be junked.
It will make for a less perfect, less precise, and less preachy discipline, but it will make it more attuned to the real world and more attuned to humanity with all its flaws, beauty and opportunity.
And people may just start talking to us at parties again.
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