Bonus - Is Economics a Science? w/ Erik Baker

American Prestige

Daniel Bessner & Derek Davison

History, Politics, News

4.8 • 705 Ratings

🗓️ 17 August 2025

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Subscribe now for the full episode! Danny welcomes back to the show Erik Baker, a lecturer in the history of science at Harvard, to discuss criticisms of economics as a science and touch on nuclear history. They talk about the struggle of early 20th-century economists to formalize their field, the Progressive Era desire to rationally manage society, the postwar effort to quantify economics and the role of the university therein, the paradigms structuring economics that rely too much on “experts,” the actor-network theory critique, the pitfalls of reducing complex issues to quantification and modeling, and whether there’s a better way to aggregate the information economics seeks to interpret. The conversation then turns to Erik’s article on the history of nuclear science. Read Erik’s pieces “The History of Economics as Science Critique: Demystification and Its Limits” and “The History of Nuclear Science.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, Prestige Head
0:10.0	Hello, Prestige heads, and welcome to American Prestige. I'm Danny Bessner here alone all day because Derek has to, quote, find himself. But I'm very happy to be joined once again by my friend Eric Baker.
0:34.8	Eric's a lecturer in the history of science department at Harvard, and he's also
0:39.6	the author of two interesting new articles, one on the basic criticism of economics as a science,
0:47.9	and another on nuclear history. So Eric, thanks for joining me. Thanks so much. Great to be back.
0:55.5	So I really liked your article in the history of economics because it allowed me to return to one
1:00.0	of my first major interests, which is the history of social science and the type of denaturalization
1:05.3	and demystification of social science itself as a scientific project. I think this comes maybe from some personal things.
1:13.3	I'm an elder millennial, grew up in an era where economics was really valorized and fetishized
1:19.3	as the discipline that would allow you to really understand not only the economy, but history,
1:25.2	reality itself. And then when I actually started looking more into it,
1:29.1	I took a couple of economics classes.
1:31.4	I read more in the actual history of it.
1:34.0	It pretty quickly was demystified as not an accurate way to understand the world.
1:38.7	But before we even get into your article,
1:40.5	I think it might be useful to basically just situate economics as a historical
1:45.7	project. And maybe I could start and maybe you could go from there. Does that sound good?
1:49.8	Yeah, sounds great. Yeah, so economics emerges sometime in the 19th century, variably in different
1:55.4	countries. I think the major countries through which it was institutionalized in the university
1:59.5	or perhaps not surprisingly Germany and then the United States, because these are the two countries through which it was institutionalized in the university or perhaps not surprisingly Germany and then the United States because these are the two countries that have the largest and
2:05.7	most complex university systems by the turn of the 20th century. It emerges actually a very
2:10.7	interesting book by a German scholar whose first name was Wolfgang, but now I can't remember
	...

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