Another academic discipline may not have the ear of presidents
but may actually do a better job of explaining what has gone wrong in large swaths of the United States and other advanced nations in recent years.
“Once economists have the ears of people in Washington, they convince them
that the only questions worth asking are the questions that economists are equipped to answer,” said Michèle Lamont, a Harvard sociologist and president of the American Sociological Association.
And Jennifer M. Silva of Bucknell University has in recent years studied young working-class adults
and found a profound sense of economic insecurity in which the traditional markers of reaching adulthood — buying a house, getting married, landing a steady job — feel out of reach.
But as much as we love economics here — this column is named Economic View, after all — there just
may be a downside to this one academic discipline having such primacy in shaping public policy.
For starters, while economists tend to view a job as a straightforward exchange of labor for money, a
wide body of sociological research shows how tied up work is with a sense of purpose and identity.
For example, Ofer Sharone, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, studied unemployed white-collar workers and found
that in the United States, his subjects viewed their ability to land a job as a personal reflection of their self-worth rather than a matter of arbitrary luck.
“But what social values can do is say that unemployment isn’t just losing wages, it’s losing dignity
and self-respect and a feeling of usefulness and all the things that make human beings happy and able to function.”
That seems to be doubly true in the United States.