Nice discussion of why economists have more influence on public policy than sociologists
Orlando Patterson probably didn’t write the title of his Chronicle piece, “How Sociologists Made Themselves Irrelevant.” But it’s great clickbait, even if, as Jeremy noted over at scatterplot, the sociology self-hate “gets frankly tiresome.”
Patterson makes some fair points. But framing the question as “why sociologists failed” points attention away from a question that’s actually more interesting: “why did economists succeed?”
Patterson does gesture toward the centrality of economics to social policy. He talks about economists’ dominance of the Moving to Opportunity study and notes that, unlike sociologists, they’ve “had their say in debates over incarceration, gangs and violence, high-school dropout rates, chronic unemployment, and socioeconomic disconnection.”
But Patterson puts most of his focus on sociologists, who (he says) have turned away from policy. He reserves some secondary annoyance for the policymakers who have neglected sociology’s insights. But this misses an enormous piece of the story.
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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