From the Ivory Tower to the Commons: Economics

The Most Objective Discipline (Just Ask It)

Economics in academia loves to dress itself up as the most “objective” of the social sciences.
Equations, models, and regression lines all polished until they gleam like a freshly waxed spreadsheet.
The story goes: numbers don’t lie, and economists are the sober adults in the policy room.

But numbers don’t float in a vacuum.
They’re wielded by people.
And people bring bias, culture, politics, and occasionally a half-eaten sandwich into the room.

The Royal Economic Society’s Culture Survey found:

• Fewer than half of UK economists are satisfied with the culture of their discipline
• One in five reported discrimination or exclusion in their academic environments

Neutral?
Only if you squint hard and ignore the smell of elitism wafting from the staff lounge.

Academia is never just about knowledge.
It’s about belonging.
And in economics, belonging has long been coded:

• Male, white, middle-class, Oxbridge-trained
• Comfortable with abstraction, allergic to lived experience
• Fluent in the language of models, mildly terrified of the language of care

The RES survey showed that economic background, gender, and ethnicity still shape who thrives in economics departments.

Translation:
The discipline that claims to study inequality often reproduces it in its own corridors.
It’s like a seminar on diversity held in a room with no wheelchair access and twelve identical blazers.

Economists aren’t just crunching numbers.
They’re performing.

• Performing professionalism in seminars, even when running on caffeine and existential dread
• Performing confidence in conferences, even when impostor syndrome is screaming louder than the keynote mic
• Performing neutrality, even when their research is basically a political manifesto in disguise

As Dr Avita Rath notes, the “professional mask” hides burnout, alienation, and the cost of constantly suppressing genuine emotion.

Economics, with its obsession with rationality, is especially guilty of pretending feelings don’t exist while quietly demanding that academics manage them like unpaid interns.

Economists sometimes act like high priests.

• Guarding the temple of models
• Speaking in tongues of jargon
• Handing down policy pronouncements as if from Mount Excel

But the congregation is restless.

• Students want relevance
• Communities want answers
• The public is sceptical of experts who didn’t predict the last crash but still claim to know the future

The priestly robes are looking a little threadbare.
And someone’s spilt coffee on the sacred cost-benefit analysis.

Here’s where it keeps getting backed up:

• Diversity initiatives: promised, but slower than a macroeconomics lecture on a Friday afternoon
• Curriculum reform: debated endlessly, still dominated by neoclassical orthodoxy
• Public engagement: encouraged in theory, treated like a hobby in promotions

The system keeps getting clogged because incentives reward sameness, not change.
Publish in the “top five” journals or perish.
And those journals? They’re basically gated communities for one flavour of economics.

Here’s the irony: economics is obsessed with inequality as a research topic, but often blind to the inequalities in its own house.

• Pay gaps between men and women persist
• Ethnic minority economists report higher rates of exclusion and discrimination
• Working-class voices remain underrepresented even though economics claims to study class

It’s like a doctor who lectures on nutrition while living on crisps.
The theory is sharp.
The practice? Hollow and slightly salty.

Let’s ask the awkward questions:

• Who decides what counts as “rigorous”?
• Who gets excluded by that definition?
• What would economics look like if lived experience was treated as data?
• How do we measure success: by journal rankings or by social impact?

Because if your model can predict inflation but not burnout, maybe it’s time to update the variables.

What if economics wasn’t about guarding the ivory tower, but about opening the gates?

• Teaching economics as a common, not a club
• Valuing pluralism, feminist, ecological, behavioural, and heterodox approaches alongside the mainstream
• Recognising that numbers are never neutral, they’re always embedded in stories, values, and power

Because economics is too important to be left to the high priests.
Especially the ones who still think “care” is a soft skill.

It’s equations and egos.
Models and masks.
Prestige and pressure.
A discipline that claims neutrality but is riddled with culture.
A field that studies inequality while struggling with its own.

The invitation is not to abandon economics, but to reimagine it.
To make it less about punishment and prestige, more about participation and care.

And maybe just maybe to let someone bring crisps to the seminar.

Economics in academia is not just about GDP curves and regression lines.
It’s about who gets to speak, who gets to belong, and whose stories count as data.

If economics wants to matter, it has to stop pretending it’s above culture and start admitting it’s part of it.

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