Dan Drezner lays the smackdown on economics in this little bit of commentary from Marketplace.
For decades, there was a clear but unspoken pecking order in the social sciences. Economists were royalty, and every other discipline was part of the peasantry. Economists were treated as real scholars, with their very own Nobel Prize and everything.
Political scientists, on the other hand, were mocked for having the word "science" in the title. The old joke goes that an economist who switches to studying political science raises the average intelligence of both disciplines. It's not true, but the perception is powerful. Powerful enough for Sen. Tom Coburn to have tried scrapping National Science Foundation funding for "poli sci" earlier this year.
Coburn's effort failed, however, and for good reason -- 2009 was a banner year for political scientists, and a not-so-banner year for economists.
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