I had an economist at my Thanksgiving table last week.
That’s not a joke or punchline. That’s just a fact. She doesn’t seem like an economist. She is remarkably charming, warm and personable. So, I usually don’t think of her as being an economist.
What do I mean by that, by “being an economist.” Well, in my experience I have found the field of economics to suffer from the greatest degree of disciplinary arrogance of any field. It appears that they train and acculturate this belief that their toolbox is so outstanding that there is no need to learn—or even respect—the substantive expertise of those in other disciplines. Disciplinary Arrogance.
Now, I am not what I would consider highly expert in school dress code policies. I have been following the issue for 30-40 years. I occasionally read professional research articles on the topic. I follow news links on new developments or examples. But I have not done my own original research or any sort of exhaustive review on the literature—though I sure have read more than one literature review from others over the decades. School dress codes and uniforms is one of those areas of policy and policy implementation that run right into my own beliefs on adolescent identity and social development. So, this topic brings a few professional interests together, even though I do not actually focus my own work on it.
But the economist has a different relationship to this topic. For some second-hand personal reason, she did (or trusted) a little bit of internet research on the topic and was highly confident that she understands the subtleties and complexities of how the law interacted with a particular charter school’s school uniform policy implementation. She thought she understood what the New York Board of Regents had required of public schools.
It was not a public school. It was charter schools, but she did not understand that charter schools are not public schools. (When I pointed out that there are simply privatized provision of traditionally publicly delivered services, she immediately got the point. She’s an economist, so she was already familiar with that dynamic, though she did not recognize it herself). It was not the Board of Regents, but was instead a new policy from the city’s Department of Education prompted by a New York City Council bill.
Most importantly, she did not understand the substance of the DOE guidelines. She did not know the history of the issues, the problems that the new guidelines were specifically designed to address or the significance of the particular language within the guidelines (e.g., “distracting). She thought that she understood it all, for having read the guidelines and applying her own knowledge and thinking to the document. She thought that her reading was accurate and her conclusions correct. She insisted on it. She refused to accept that she could have been wrong.
But expertise matters. Which means that intellectual and disciplinary humility matter. While playing in someone else’s backyard—and expression I think I learned from Andrew Gelman—can be fun, it is important to listen and to be mindful of the limits of one’s own expertise. It is important to learn from those with greater expertise, usually by asking questions. This requires acknowledging the expertise of others.
Which, unfortunately, is something that economists generally are not very good at.