Any reason you think we should focus on economics in particular and not other social sciences like e.g sociology or public health? Or even a combination of different sciences?
Mainly because I saw this working (and because I think it’s important)
I’m not saying the others aren’t important—I’m just not hurrying to generalize, I think there’s still uncertainty even for doing this more for Econ and moving to another topic will add more uncertainty
Philosophy is also much more tightly integrated with other social studies like law, political science, history, sociology, gender studies… which in turn all make a lot of attempts to integrate themselves with all the other social sciences. This makes it so that learning about one discipline also teaches you about the other disciplines. Economics meanwhile doesn’t associate itself with the other disciplines that much. Economists have a tendency to see their discipline as better than the others starting papers with things like:
Economics is not only a social science, it is a genuine science. Like the physical sciences, economics uses a methodology that produces refutable implications and tests these implications using solid statistical techniques.
In the paper “The Superiority of Economists” by Fourcade et al, economists were found to be the only group that thought interdisciplinary research was worse than research from a singular field. Furthermore they looked at top papers from political science, economics and sociology. They found that political science and sociology cited economics papers many times more than the other way around:
This lack of citing other social sciences was later confirmed by Angrist et al (though to be fair, it is getting better and psychology is even worse):
Given the complex interdisciplinary nature of societal issues (and the problem that teaching people a little bit of economics might make things worse as I outlined in my other comment) it seems logical to conclude that other social studies might be better suited, and we have a lot of empirical evidence for the effectiveness of philosophy.
Any reason you think we should focus on economics in particular and not other social sciences like e.g sociology or public health? Or even a combination of different sciences?
Mainly because I saw this working (and because I think it’s important)
I’m not saying the others aren’t important—I’m just not hurrying to generalize, I think there’s still uncertainty even for doing this more for Econ and moving to another topic will add more uncertainty
(but I’m not against)
I think that if we want to make people more like EA’s we have the most evidence that teaching them the field of philosophy yields the highest results.
Here is a post about it, but TLDR we have lots of studies that find it contributes to cognitive development and moral development.
Philosophy is also much more tightly integrated with other social studies like law, political science, history, sociology, gender studies… which in turn all make a lot of attempts to integrate themselves with all the other social sciences. This makes it so that learning about one discipline also teaches you about the other disciplines. Economics meanwhile doesn’t associate itself with the other disciplines that much. Economists have a tendency to see their discipline as better than the others starting papers with things like:
In the paper “The Superiority of Economists” by Fourcade et al, economists were found to be the only group that thought interdisciplinary research was worse than research from a singular field. Furthermore they looked at top papers from political science, economics and sociology. They found that political science and sociology cited economics papers many times more than the other way around:
This lack of citing other social sciences was later confirmed by Angrist et al (though to be fair, it is getting better and psychology is even worse):
Given the complex interdisciplinary nature of societal issues (and the problem that teaching people a little bit of economics might make things worse as I outlined in my other comment) it seems logical to conclude that other social studies might be better suited, and we have a lot of empirical evidence for the effectiveness of philosophy.
Interesting!