The standard advice from economists about concentrated market power is that it is inefficient, unfair and should be broken up or regulated. The standard retort from concentrated industries is that they are merely super-efficient at the business they do.
But what if the concentrated business is economists themselves? A study documents a “high and rising” concentration of Nobel Prize winners in a handful of top US universities: more than half their combined career time has been spent at just eight economics departments. Equivalent measures for other disciplines, from natural sciences to the humanities, are going the other way.
There are other signs of economics turning into an elite closed shop: the handful of journals acting as gatekeepers to career advancement are largely controlled by economists from the same top departments, who also disproportionately pass through the revolving doors into policymaking jobs.