Economists grew from roughly one to four percent of university faculty over a century.

Evidence

Curiously enough, there are no good aggregate time series of proportions of distinct disciplines’ representations within any national university system. There have been a few stabs at performing a retrospective census at a few key junctures for limited geographical areas. For instance, one paper documents the recent incursion into law schools: Of the 1,338 faculty members at the top twenty-six American law schools, beyond the J.D., 27 percent had PhDs, with economics the most common concentration at 7 percent. Another 13 percent had PhDs in some social science other than economics, while 7 percent had PhDs in a non-social-science discipline. This is a substantial increase from merely a generation ago. Another work attempts to break down faculty representation across a sample of British Commonwealth universities in a few selected years over a century concludes: “Although it is good to understand why university economics prospered more than psychology over the 20th century, it would also be good to know why at the end of the century economists were ten times more common on average in the world’s universities than psychologists.” Marion Fourcade estimates that economics grew from roughly 1 percent of all university faculty in 1900 to about 4 percent by 2000. While all of these gauges are impressionistic to varying degrees, they do point to an important trend in academe, which is the expanding proportional representation of PhD economists in universities, especially over the last three decades. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 586

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why did economics outcompete psychology so dramatically across the 20th century? The quoted British Commonwealth line leaves this genuinely open; worth chasing the explanations.