The Monkey Cage

I fear this belief is widespread (or at least, not uncommon) among economists. For example, Greg Mankiw posted a letter last year from a reader of his inquiring why economists are smarter than other academics and offering a number of hypotheses. The explanations offered were typical:

“In general, economists are smarter (we may be better looking too). It’s fashionable not to say such things, but I will bet that if you look at the GRE and SAT scores of incoming PhD students at BU, Harvard and MIT, the average economist will sit at a higher percentile than the average (non-economist) social-scientist. Given that all the other disciplines are trying to recruit students with higher scores, I’m not willing to believe the explanation that these disciplines value other attributes that aren’t measured in the GRE. Higher salaries in economics will tend to reinforce the “economists are smarter” phenomena.”

Thinking of GRE or SAT scores as measures of intelligence is certainly commonplace, but also highly problematic for all sorts of reasons we can probably agree on (see, for example, Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man or Carson’s The Measure of Merit.)

I will agree that economists are often better at Mathematics than their social science peers - but this finding is unsurprising, given the content of undergraduate economics courses, the emphasis on mathematical background in graduate admissions, and the fact that an econ PhD program has almost 100% mathematical coursework. I could similarly argue that sociologists are smarter than economists because economists know nothing of social theory and are incredibly unhelpful in debates about the proper interpretation of Weber, in spite of the fact that Weber was an economist. But we would all know this argument was silly - knowing social theory isn’t a measure of intelligence, and yet somehow we think knowing math is.

Different social sciences have different priorities, and some of those priorities are valued more highly in other disciplines or in the world beyond academia. It’s too bad economics programs have so little emphasis on reflexivity, or more economists might understand the above statement and not end up deluding themselves into believing they are the smartest guys in the room.

According to this post over at Makiw, political scientists have approximately the same verbal scores as economists on the GRE with substantially lower analytical and quantitative scores.

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2008/11/larry-vindicated.html

As an anecdote, my undergraduate adviser had a joint appointment in the economics and political science department and he believed that he could get me into any top political science program I wanted, but could only give me a shot at the best economics departments.

I’m a political scientist, and my GRE scores were pretty damn high—higher in all three columns than the average economist in that linked table, for example. But I feel that I would be an idiot to take that as a sign that I am smarter than most other people.

Rosmar: Why? I’ve always seen intelligence as imperfectly measured by tests (IQ, GRE, ASVAB or whatever), but decently correlated with true intelligence. I say that conditional on your GRE scores, the probability of you being less intelligent than others is low.

The GRE is an achievement test, not an intelligence test.

political scientists have approximately the same verbal scores as economists on the GRE with substantially lower analytical and quantitative scores.

That chart doesn’t show that.

What it shows is that GRE-takers who say that they hope to enter a political science program have, on average, scores that are lower than GRE-takers who say that they hope to enter an econ program.

That chart says precisely squat about the GRE scores of people admitted to political science and econ PhD programs.

It says less than squat about the incoming GRE scores of people who successfully complete PhDs in economics and poli sci.

It says even less than less-than-squat about the GRE scores of political scientists and economists — people who have not just applied, not just been accepted, not just graduated, but also successfully secured tenure=track employment in their field.

I myself improved A LOT (from 710 to 780) my GRE scores just studying the simple math from the 7th or 8th grade (in my country) that I never studied properly before. If I had the patience to study more this boring and useless math I probably would have improved the scores even more: did I became more intelligent in the late 20’s of my life?

What about the people in Medicine who have lower GRE scores than both econ and polish students but make more money than all others?

Perfect GRE scores, political scientist here. This and eight quarters entitles me to a MetroCard.

As Antonio says above, the GRE measures 7th-grade math. Not a good measure of much of anything.

I would say that, small-sample anecdote-ly, those who are both sociologists and political scientists (e.g., Theda) are smarter than economists (e.g., Larry).

What surprises (or not) me is that the economists seem to be overlooking both selection effects and the ecological fallacy, which destroy the plausibility and applicability of the claim even on its own terms. I think Antonio has a good point about the ‘easiness’ of the quantitative section, in that I went back to fractions (i.e. the beginning) to study for the maths GRE and got a near perfect score after 2 months - but if I hadn’t focused on that I would have done a lot worse. The verbal and analytical would seem to count more for graduate level ‘intelligence’, but even then, it is problematic to claim that any given political scientist is less intelligent than any given economist based on aggregate figures.

Given the non-sequitours posted here, it’s hard for me not to stick to my priors, and all available price signals - economists are on average smarter than political scientists.

By that last poster’s logic, economists are on average dumber than top-40 pop acts.

Also, I do wonder what a non-sequitour is. One that you haven’t been on before? One where the guide determines the next site to visit by randomizing?

I hope we can at least all agree that we’re smarter than sociologists.

Gould was even less reliable when it came to psychometrics than evolutionary biology.

Plenty of political scientists would agree with Larry, unfortunately. The main argument is that economists use more sophisticated quantitative methods than us. Check this thread and you’ll see what I’m talking about:
http://www.poliscijobrumors.com/topic.php?id=521