Are economists declining in status?

That is the theme ofmy latest Free Press article. Excerpt, which offers the beginning of the story: If we look at the 1960s, the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson administrations brought James Tobin, Robert Solow, Kenneth Arrow (all three later Nobel laureates), Arthur Okun, Walter Heller, Gardner Ackley, Otto Eckstein, and Walt Rostow into government. Those were all names with significant academic heft who could count among the world’s leading macroeconomists. Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson served as a consultant to the government. Heller and some of the others helped to shape the Kennedy-Johnson tax cut of 1964. That cluster of talent and its influence should come as no surprise. This was an age of elites, of love for science, of the moon landing project, and of network news shows with an establishment bent. Americans were used to deferring to elites, who had won World War II for them, and who were not out there making fools of themselves on the internet. With the Cold War raging, Americans felt their government had to get it right… Most of this respect was still in place by the 1980s. President Ronald Reagan appointed Martin Feldstein to chair his Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), Feldstein being a Harvard professor and one of the leading market-oriented economists of his time. Two of the junior economists working for Feldstein were Paul Krugman and Lawrence Summers—before they became famous, but the intellectual firepower was already there. Michael Mussa and William Niskanen were other notables in the administration, and Milton Friedman and Friedrich A. Hayek were standing sources of inspiration. On top of those political trends, there are further mechanisms at work pushing down the social status of economists. The Trump administration isproposing to eliminatesocial sciences funding at the National Science Foundation, and there are declining enrollments on the horizon for American colleges and universities. Academia is now seen as more politicized and left-leaning than used to be the case. Our best AI models are often better economists than the humans, just as they are proving theorems that human mathematicians cannot. All of those trends, even if you might consider some of them good news overall, are reinforcing a declining status for economists.