“Concepts like national identity, national sovereignty or social trust are very hard to cash out in economic terms—yet they’re strongly predictive of a country’s future prosperity.”
The 2024 economics Nobel was awarded precisely for work that examines the formation of socio-political institutions and trust and the importance of these things for long-run prosperity. Similarly, the importance of deterence in criminal justice and war (which the article implies is difficult to account for in economics) is a standard example when studying repeated games in introductory microeconomics.
This is not to deny that people regularly ignore these nuances, and perhaps it is problematic that arguments that do so obtain a veneer of rigour when they are expressed using ideas and terminology from economics. But this is not a problem with economics per se. Economics as a discipline provides tools and concepts that help us order our thinking about social and economic problems (not to mention quantive methods), but these tools are not so narrow as to provide one single solution to any problem. When thinking through an economic question you have to choose which mechanisms are important enough that you should account for them and which can be safely ignored, which outcomes to focus on, whether you treat the problem as static or dynamic. Perhaps the problem is not “econ-brain” but rather the dressing up of overly simplistic arguments as scientific through the use of economic jargon.
“Concepts like national identity, national sovereignty or social trust are very hard to cash out in economic terms—yet they’re strongly predictive of a country’s future prosperity.”
The 2024 economics Nobel was awarded precisely for work that examines the formation of socio-political institutions and trust and the importance of these things for long-run prosperity. Similarly, the importance of deterence in criminal justice and war (which the article implies is difficult to account for in economics) is a standard example when studying repeated games in introductory microeconomics.
This is not to deny that people regularly ignore these nuances, and perhaps it is problematic that arguments that do so obtain a veneer of rigour when they are expressed using ideas and terminology from economics. But this is not a problem with economics per se. Economics as a discipline provides tools and concepts that help us order our thinking about social and economic problems (not to mention quantive methods), but these tools are not so narrow as to provide one single solution to any problem. When thinking through an economic question you have to choose which mechanisms are important enough that you should account for them and which can be safely ignored, which outcomes to focus on, whether you treat the problem as static or dynamic. Perhaps the problem is not “econ-brain” but rather the dressing up of overly simplistic arguments as scientific through the use of economic jargon.