Should Economics Be Classified as a STEM Subject?

In recent years there has been a big push to have economics classified as a STEM field--and while this issue is not exactly high on the public agenda it does seem worth saying that most of the discussion of the issue is in favor of such a change. And at a glance that may seem natural. After all, economics is supposed to be a science, and as currently taught it is certainly intensively mathematical.

However, the issue is more complex than it looks--because of the ambiguities of the STEM category, and the context in which proponents of the idea are trying to make STEM a part of it.

Just What is STEM Anyway?
In the past I have admitted to a dislike of the term STEM. This was mainly a reaction to its glib slogan-ness, which it seemed to me made it easier for people to push a bunch of simple-minded and harmful attitudes all the more forcefully—in particular the idea of a hierarchy of intellectual endeavor (and the minds which pursue them), and the diversion of attention from the real problems of the country's manufacturing base, and its college graduates, and much, much else associated them with a dismissive "Those lazy, stupid young people are studying the wrong things."

Still, there is also the (totally unsurprising) intellectual haziness behind the glib formulation. STEM awkwardly lumps together Science, Technology, Engineering, Math--which is to say forms of knowledge and activity to be found all across the economy, such that one can define it so broadly as to include virtually everyone. The number of working people who have absolutely nothing to do with any of those fields in their work is not exactly high, and likely falling all the time with anyone at a desk likely to have a computer in front of them--while going much less far one finds blurry boundaries. Consider, for example, the elementary school teacher who performs the important function of imparting the rudiments of math and science to very young people who will include the STEM workers of tomorrow. Consider the doctor who is lengthily trained in the sciences and their application. Certainly they merit acknowledgment as STEM workers--but they are not what people usually think of when (again, glibly) tossing about the term. Instead what they seem to have in mind was physical scientists (physicists, chemists, etc.), engineers, and people with advanced training in allied occupations (mathematics, computers) devoted to the work of high-technology physical production--and STEM made a cause célèbre in the name of expanding the work force for high-technology manufacturing, such that what was wanted was not so much more in the way of pure scientists or mathematicians (certainly there is no shortage of, for example, qualified Ph.d-holding applicants for tenured university positions in those fields) as more of the Technology and Engineering folks for industry.

But of course the fuzziness, and the hype about STEM, STEM, STEM! gave it the status of "cool kids club" and everyone wanted in (the more in as educational institutions craved the government and private sector support--read: money--going or likely to go to STEM, the more so amid the brutal austerity of the general scene), such that the head can spin just trying to keep track with all the initiatives to get this field recognized as STEM, that field recognized as STEM. And economics has been no exception. But if we are to stick with what STEM is really about then, no, economics does not have a claim here. But even if we take the broader view we still find ourselves facing other important questions.

Physics Envy?
Economics as we know it is a product of the Enlightenment and its respect for science--with the same going for its being a specifically mathematical science (where, at least from the standpoint of mainstream, neoclassical economics, Stanley Jevons' work was foundational). Indeed, the aspiration has been reflected in the etymology of the term "economics." Where people previously spoke of "political economy" from the dawn of its neoclassical era on they increasingly cut out the "political"—cut of the idea that economic life and its rules were rooted in specific historical, technological, social, cultural--and political--conditions, and instead presented economic life as "autonomous." Putting it another way it bespoke the claim that what (mainstream) economists taught--above all, the optimality of profit-seeking, property-owning private individuals being left to their own devices as completely as physically and morally possible, with any attempt to alter the direction of economic life from the path such individuals put it on not only the worst of oppression, but an exercise in futility certain to produce catastrophe--was as indifferent to particular social conditions, as true in all times and places, as Newton's laws of motion.

Not everyone agreed with that teaching, of course, and that being the case they could still less agree with the grand claim for their teaching as eternal truth--the insistence that "This is science!" an attempt to rationalize what the rich find convenient and hostility to anything they would find inconvenient, with the pretense to it all being "science" suspect down to the use of the math itself. (Indeed, as economist James K. Galbraith--who, far from being the harshest critic contemporary economics has, and certainly no anti-capitalist-- remarked, "the clumsy algebra of a typical professional economics article" is there "not to clarify, or to charm, but to intimidate," for ideas "that would come across as simpleminded in English can be made 'impressive looking' with a sufficient string of Greek symbols," and any critic of the argument dismissed as simply too obtuse to follow all the math.)

Moreover, it is notable that those calling for economics to be recognized as a STEM field are not making the same demand on behalf of other social sciences--indeed, are often prone to distance economics from those subjects out of which it grew in line with common prejudices. Social science is squishy and useless, they say--in contrast with practical, useful, tough-minded economics. Again, there is a political prejudice here--namely, against what such persons tend to see as the leftishness of the social sciences (the biggest reason of all for their contempt toward it), as against an economics field whose mainstream has overwhelmingly and squarely stood with the right for the last century and a half (by cutting those social sciences out of the picture, by when Keynesianism could not be ignored bastardizing it beyond all recognition, by nurturing the intellectual seeds of and propagandizing for the neoliberal revolution) a significant factor in its comparative respectability.

In considering the drive to get economics recognized as a STEM field one cannot overlook this dimension of the issue--which to those who object with the claims for economics can only seem the more wrong-headed at a moment when the neoliberal project that the economics field has so squarely promoted, enabled, helped operate stands in more discredit than it has been at any point since it became a political force a half century ago.