The Economics of Economic Expertise: Between Agent Competence and Societal Construction

This paper treats the structure of economic theory as a product of spontaneously ordered relationships among theorists in a setting where different institutional frameworks can govern those relationships. Those differences generate different selection principles among economic theories and, thus, different qualities of economic expertise. Under one framework, relationships among theorists are dyadic. This is the world of self-financed amateurs. Under an alternative framework those relationships are triadic. This is the world of professionals supported by third parties. In the former setting, expertise emerges through the conferral of admiration by participants. In the latter setting, the qualities of expertise can be governed to a significant degree by the interests of those third parties. In this instance, the selection among theoretical formulations is becomes biased in favor of conceptualizations that can enlist economics science in the service of those third parties. If in turn those outside interests reside in support of a progressivist and activist state, economic theory becomes oriented toward economic engineering rather than economic understanding. This claim is illustrated with respect to macro theory and public economics.

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