Another academic discipline may not have the ear of presidents<br />but may actually do a better job of explaining what has gone wrong in large swaths of the United States and other advanced nations in recent years.<br />“Once economists have the ears of people in Washington, they convince them<br />that the only questions worth asking are the questions that economists are equipped to answer,” said Michèle Lamont, a Harvard sociologist and president of the American Sociological Association.<br />And Jennifer M. Silva of Bucknell University has in recent years studied young working-class adults<br />and found a profound sense of economic insecurity in which the traditional markers of reaching adulthood — buying a house, getting married, landing a steady job — feel out of reach.<br />But as much as we love economics here — this column is named Economic View, after all — there just<br />may be a downside to this one academic discipline having such primacy in shaping public policy.<br />For starters, while economists tend to view a job as a straightforward exchange of labor for money, a<br />wide body of sociological research shows how tied up work is with a sense of purpose and identity.<br />For example, Ofer Sharone, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, studied unemployed white-collar workers and found<br />that in the United States, his subjects viewed their ability to land a job as a personal reflection of their self-worth rather than a matter of arbitrary luck.<br />“But what social values can do is say that unemployment isn’t just losing wages, it’s losing dignity<br />and self-respect and a feeling of usefulness and all the things that make human beings happy and able to function.”<br />That seems to be doubly true in the United States.
