The fastest growing area in the social sciences: economics! Since all human behavior is thought to be able to be boiled down to processes of exchange, some economists see themselves as those most social of the social scientists, or at the very least the most fundamental (and fundamentally important). Economists believe they are studying the most rudimentary of human functions. But they seem to have devised an economics without people.

I selected all articles from 2007-2008 in The Journal of Economic Literature and ran word counts from the 18 abstracts. The word cloud you see below contains the 50 most commonly used words (among 2,147 total), with word size indicating relative frequency. In viewing the entire list and counts of words, those referencing “people” in any way are scarce, and “real-world” is mentioned once.

          Economists have managed to write people out of their equations.

In “Making Famine History,” by Cormac Ó Gráda, published in the March 2007 issue of The Journal of Economic Literature, famines are discussed in terms of domestic products and the impacts of floods and drought on Food Availability Declines (FAD). He provides a thorough discussion of food markets, disaster relief, entitlements and so on, but doesn’t deal much with the experience of famine, or more succinctly the experience of starving…. Until the section titled “Counting the dead.” Ah! We can talk about starvation now that we have a means to speak of it quantitatively. Bodies are relevant in this story once they are dead weight. But, Ó Gráda likes the dead bodies, because they are the best signal of famine for economists. Food shortages are messy and difficult to measure. But a dead human body is a +1 in the “deaths” column! And when there’s an “abnormal jump” then we have something to write about without those other niggling measures. What’s the “takeaway” in making famine history? Not many famines today look like those that Malthus (or the Bible) described. Get southern Somalia on the phone, I’m sure they’ll be happy to hear the news.

Economists have managed to write people back into their equations – when they’re dead.