Economists have ample opportunities to influence policymakers: earning appointments to regulatory boards, sitting on advising councils, writing up cost-benefit analyses, etc.
Economics strives to be a science, in which decisions are made through empirical analysis. This is basically the job security in policymakers continuing to use economists as a resource - if economists start letting their personal biases affect their findings, they start to look more like a politician than a scientist - and typically the last thing policymakers need to solve their problems is more politicians.
Additionally, if groups of economists start to agree with each other often enough, they essentially start to look more like political parties than independent academics. Policymakers then can simply cherry-pick evidence from whichever “school of thought” confirms their own biases.
So do economists disagree with each other in meaningful ways? Do they have their own opinions and perspectives, or do they mostly adhere to the same left-right divide we see with US politicians?
We can assess the range of opinions among economists using data provided by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Booth has regularly surveyed a panel of economic experts on all sorts of public policy issues, creating the IGM Economic Experts Panel. In total, the data contains 25 panelists' opinions on 63 questions.
We used hierarchical clustering to sort these economists into three clusters based on how often they agree with one another:
The dendrogram chart below gives a more granular view of the clusters, showing how closely aligned specific panelists within a cluster are. For example, Edlin and Scheinkman are the most likeminded of all the possible pairs in cluster 1; Fair and Thaler are the most aligned in cluster 2. The dendrogram also reveals that clusters 2 and 3 are "closer" to one another than either are with cluster 1, meaning they may agree on some policy areas not discussed above (whether firm’s combined market share equates to market power, for example).
Finally, cluster 2 is significantly larger than the other two clusters - in fact, the lot is large enough to host significant subsets: although the 13 economists agree with each other enough to differentiate themselves from the other clusters, we see a fissure within the group (likely caused by disagreement over less substantive issues, such as the effect of colleges admitting children of alumni and donors).
There’s a reason we needed a machine to find like-minded groups for us: there weren't any immediately obvious patterns. These panelists are not falling along liberal-conversation ideological lines; they’re not really following any obvious dichotomies (such as “neoclassic economists” vs “Keynesian economists”).
While there are absolutely liberal and conservative economists in this panel, there were also dozens of policy questions without obvious pre-defined sides. Additionally, two panelists agreeing with the Keynesian school of thought doesn’t suggest they’d agree on other questions. In short: any two economists chosen at random may strongly agree with each other on one topic and strongly disagree on another. The economists are thinking for themselves.
Code and data for this project available on Github.