Hug an Economist Day

What the day is

Hug an Economist Day is observed on January 31. The joke depends on economists being difficult to hug, which they have generally been good-humored about.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented. The stereotype it plays on is worth examining, because it is half true in an interesting way.

Ask two economists a question and you get three answers, runs the line. Surveys of academic economists tell a different story. When asked about propositions within their field, agreement is frequently overwhelming: on the effects of tariffs, on rent controls reducing housing supply, on carbon pricing reducing emissions, large majorities line up together. What the public sees is disagreement because the questions that reach the news are precisely the contested ones, and because economists appearing in public are often arguing about values, forecasts or politics rather than about economics.

Forecasting is where the reputation is deserved. Predicting recessions has a genuinely poor track record, and the discipline largely failed to anticipate the 2008 financial crisis, which prompted real internal argument about the models in use.

The field has also changed considerably. It is now far more empirical than theoretical, working with large datasets, natural experiments and randomized trials in the field, and several recent Nobel prizes have gone to exactly that kind of work. Behavioral economics has absorbed the psychological findings that the older rational-actor models left out.

The dismal science label, incidentally, was coined by Thomas Carlyle in the nineteenth century, and not as a complaint about pessimism. He applied it because economists of the day opposed slavery.

How to take part

• Ask an economist what their field agrees on. The answer is longer than expected.
• Read where the dismal science phrase came from, which reverses its usual use.
• Distinguish forecasts from analysis when reading economic commentary.
• Look up one natural experiment, which shows how the modern discipline actually works.
• Offer the hug. Ask first, as with any other hug.