Peak economist
On Friday, the New York Times published an interesting article by Justin Wolfers about the kind of experts the paper mentions. Don’t worry, he’s aware of the methodological issues:
While the idea of measuring influence through newspaper mentions will elicit howls of protest from tweed-clad boffins sprawled across faculty lounges around the country, the results are fascinating.
To summarize: by his measure, economists have become the most influential profession among the social sciences and their influence rises during economic crises. Or at least so in the New York Times. I looked up data for the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, which has data available from 1990.
Some conclusions can be drawn:
- The current ranking is the same as for the NYT, with economists heading the list and demographers at the bottom;
- Apparently, NRC Handelsblad has always had a pretty high regard for historians, but due to the crisis they lost their top position to economists;
- There was a peak in mentions of psychologist in 2012, but some of that can be ascribed to reports of scientific fraud by psychologist Diederik Stapel.
For comparison, I tried reproducing Wolfers’ NYT chart for the years 1990 - 2014. Here’s what I got:
The sudden increase for all professions in 2014 is unexpected - see Method for possible explanations. If we leave 2014 aside, what emerges is that «peak economist» (to borrow an expression from Wolfers) seems to have happened earlier in the NYT than in NRC Handelsblad. Perhaps something to do with the fact that the crisis hit the US earlier than Europe.
Method
The NYT data were downloaded from the NYT Chronicle Tool (I had to separately download the data for each search term). Data from NRC Handelsblad were downloaded using the website’s search function. In order to get the total numbers per year I also did a search using «de» («the») as a search term («de» is the most frequently used word in written Dutch).
As indicated in the article, I got a steep rise in the percentages for all professions in the NYT in 2014. I manually checked some of the percentages I got against those in the chart of the NYT Chronicle Tool, and these appear to be correct. The spike is not visible in Wolfers’ chart, but that may be due to the fact that he uses three-year averages.
There may be an issue with the denominator, i.e. the total number of articles. The number for total_articles_published
in the data I downloaded from the NYT was pretty stable at about 100,000 between 1990 and 2005. Then it rose to about 250,000 in 2013 (perhaps something to do with changed archiving practices, or with online publishing?). However, in 2014, it dropped to about one-third of the 2013 level.
The NRC Handelsblad data also has some fluctuations in the total number of articles per year, but less extreme and at first sight they don’t seem to coincide with unexpected fluctuations in the percentages of articles mentioning professions.
Code is available here.