“The Golden Chalice, but also Fetishized”: Policy-Based Evidence and Epistemocratic Power in Economics

• In Event: Knowledge, Expertise, and Economic Valuation

Abstract

When sociologists analyze expert fields like economics, they typically focus on questions such as: what is economic research for? To make policy? Or to advance our understanding of the social world? Rather than taking sides in such debates, this paper proposes that the role of economic expertise is to maintain 'epistemocratic power.' While historians of economics have often attributed the field’s social influence to its support for free market ideology, sociologists have recently developed explanations that more accurately describe how economics operates in concrete empirical settings, with its political success deriving from other factors. Nevertheless, these accounts still mostly assume that economists are motivated by a desire to shape policy and are successful in doing so. Drawing on interviews with 46 economic experts and case studies from health economics and the economics of education, I demonstrate the opposite process: the influence of policy on economics. I argue that the failure to theorize this reverse effect is due to the fact that sociological research on economics has not sufficiently grappled with the transformation in the field’s status hierarchy toward applied microeconomic research and causal inference, which has altered the logic of practice for conducting economic research. While economists themselves refer to this as a ‘credibility revolution,’ I contend that the field’s habitus has become increasingly oriented around leveraging policy variation to accrue scientific capital: 'policy-based evidence,' not evidence-based policy. Operating within this policy-based evidence paradigm, economists engage in narrower and narrower methodological debates that paradoxically allow them to harness symbolic authority as policy experts without actually driving policy change. Through the exercise of epistemocratic power, economists sustain an epistemic position that is simultaneously both politically disinterested and intensely focused on the technical aspects of policy problems.

Author

• Zachary Webster Griffen, New York University