Economists are agreeing with each other more

OBSERVERS HAVE long poked fun at the inability of the economics profession to make up its mind. “If parliament were to ask six economists for an opinion, seven would come back,” runs one version of an old joke. Yet the gibes may be losing their force. A new paper, by Doris Geide-Stevenson and Alvaro La Parra Perez of Weber State University, finds that economists are agreeing with each other more on a number of policy-related questions.The paper publishes the results of the latest wave of a survey of economists that has been conducted roughly once a decade since 1976 (though the results of the first wave are not entirely comparable with later ones). Members of the American Economic Association were asked whether they agreed with a number of propositions, ranging from the economic impact of minimum-wage increases to the desirability of universal health insurance. Based on the frequency of responses, the researchers devised an index that captured the degree of consensus on each question.