Question: When was the last time an economist had big impact outside economics? It’s been a while. Gary Becker might be the best example, but that was in the 1970s – forty years ago!!! Of course, there are individual papers or research findings that attract interest (e.g., Deaton’s recent work on mortality), but more recent examples of work that change areas outside economics are hard to find. For example, Steve Levitt is hugely popular, but he hasn’t changed the way people think about areas outside of economics. At best, the big message of early 2000s “cute-o-nomics” is that we can try harder to find clean identification in naturally occurring data. Not a bad message, but not epic, either. And a lot of people were kind of doing that already.
More recently, one might think of Daron Acemoglu, for his massive work on development, or Esther Duflo for field experiments. Both…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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