Break Up Big Econ

September 9, 2024, Opinion: "Economists generally agree that competition is good, and that markets with only a few dominant players are inefficient. We may need to take a hard look in the mirror. According to a new working paper, the recipients of major economics prizes, including the Nobel, have collectively spent half their career at just eight universities: Harvard (where I teach), Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, the University of Chicago, Columbia, and Berkeley. Award-winning scientists in fields such as chemistry, engineering, and medicine, by contrast, represent a much more diverse range of institutions. By applying a metric commonly used in antitrust cases, the authors—the economists Richard B. Freeman, Danxia Xie, Hanzhe Zhang, and Hanzhang Zhou—showed that Nobel Prizes in economics are nearly five times more concentrated than in chemistry, physics, and medicine. Even more alarming, economics is the only one of the 18 fields studied in which concentration is increasing."