The Political Limits of Economics

Luigi Zingales

AEA Papers and Proceedings, 2020, vol. 110, 378-82

Abstract: We economists do not apply economic tools to analyze our own discipline. If we were to do so, we would discover that we have self-motivated explanations for why political systems fail, explanations that entitle us to impose our views on elected representatives. We would also discover that we have preferences not aligned with the rest of the population, we can be captured, and we suffer of groupthink. I propose some remedies our profession can adopt to reduce these problems, including becoming less clubbish and more inclusive.

JEL-codes: A11 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/pandp.20201002 (application/pdf)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/pandp.20201002.ds (application/zip)
Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aea:apandp:v:110:y:2020:p:378-82

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.aeaweb.org/subscribe.html

DOI: 10.1257/pandp.20201002

Access Statistics for this article

AEA Papers and Proceedings is currently edited by William Johnson and Kelly Markel

More articles in AEA Papers and Proceedings from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().