Economics has an elitism problem

A handful of elite universities control the discipline. That’s not excellence — it’s monopoly.

AI-created image by Jostein Hauge

Every year when the Nobel Prize in Economics is announced, a familiar pattern emerges. The winners almost invariably have one thing in common: they’ve passed through an elite US university — usually Harvard, Chicago, MIT, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, Berkeley, and Columbia. Defenders of this pattern will tell you these institutions simply attract the world’s best minds. But this explanation doesn’t hold up. The extreme concentration of Nobel laureates at a handful of universities isn’t just about merit. It’s a symptom of deeper structural problems in economics.

I’ve seen these problems firsthand during my time in economics departments. The discipline suffers from elite dominance, intellectual gatekeeping, Western bias, and a striking lack of diversity. These forces have created a closed intellectual ecosystem — one that reinforces existing hierarchies, marginalises alternative perspectives, and limits the field’s ability to tackle the economic challenges facing most of the world.

This isn’t just an academic problem. Economics shapes policy decisions affecting billions of lives. When the discipline is dominated by a small elite trained in similar ways at similar institutions, the policies that result reflect only a narrow range of perspectives. Let me walk you through the evidence.

Economics is uniquely hierarchical and insular

In 2015, Marion Fourcade, Etienne Ollion, and Yann Algan published a landmark paper called “The Superiority of Economists.” The paper highlights that economics operates as an unusually self-reinforcing field where elite training pipelines control publication opportunities, academic positions, and intellectual influence.

They find that, although all disciplines cite their own work to some degree, “economics stands out markedly, with 81 percent of within-field citations —against 52 percent for sociology, 53 percent for anthropology, and 59 percent for political science.”

What does this insularity look like in practice? Here’s how one economist interviewed by the authors described it:

You are only supposed to follow certain rules. If you don’t follow certain rules, you are not an economist. So that means you should derive the way people behave from strict maximization theory. . . . The opposite [to being axiomatic] would be arguing by example. You’re not allowed to do that. . . . There is a word for it. People say ‘that’s anecdotal.’ That’s the end of you if people have said you’re anecdotal . . . [T]he modern thing [people say] is: ‘it’s not identified.’ God, when your causality is not identified, that’s the end of you.

This rigid gatekeeping begins early in economists’ careers. Graduate programs at top institutions determine not just who enters the profession, but what questions are considered legitimate and what methods are acceptable. Students absorb specific frameworks and techniques that become the standard for the entire discipline. Challenge these orthodoxies, and you’ll find yourself at a systematic disadvantage in publication, hiring, and career advancement.

The authors document what they call the “superiority of economists”—where the discipline’s objective supremacy is intimately linked with their subjective sense of authority and entitlement. Survey data backs this up. Economists are the only social scientists where “a (substantial) majority disagree or strongly disagree with the proposition that ‘in general, interdisciplinary knowledge is better than knowledge obtained from a single discipline.’”

This creates what Fourcade and her colleagues identify as a characteristic pattern of inequality: those in a central position within a field fail to notice peripheral actors and are also largely unaware of the principles that underpin their own domination.

The result? From the perspective of other social scientists, economists often resemble colonists settling on their land. They arrive with their tools, deploy their techniques, but rarely learn from the locals or question whether their methods actually fit the terrain.

A small elite controls the editorial machinery

The concentration problem doesn’t stop at training. It extends to how economic knowledge gets produced and validated. In their 2023 study, “Who Are the Gatekeepers of Economics?”, Alberto Baccini and Christina Re document how a remarkably small group of elite institutions and individual scholars controls the editorial machinery of the discipline’s most prestigious journals.

Their study looked at 1,516 active economics journals in 2019, which includes more than 44,000 scholars from over 6,000 institutions and 142 countries. The pattern they found is clear:

Results highlight that the academic publishing environment is primarily governed by men affiliated with elite universities in the United States. The study further explores social similarities among journals using a network analysis perspective based on interlocking editorship. Comparison of networks generated by all scholars, editorial leaders, and non-editorial leaders reveals significant structural similarities and associations among clusters of journals. These results indicate that links between pairs of journals tend to be redundant, and this can be interpreted in terms of social and intellectual homophily within each board, and between boards of journals belonging to the same cluster.

Let me break down why this matters. Academic journals are the gatekeepers of what counts as legitimate research. Editorial boards decide which papers get reviewed, which reviewers evaluate them, and ultimately which work gets published. When these boards are dominated by scholars from a handful of institutions — all sharing similar training and commitments — you get a powerful mechanism for enforcing intellectual conformity.

The interlocking editorship that Baccini and Re identify is particularly concerning. The same people sit on multiple editorial boards, creating redundant networks. This isn’t random. It reflects “social and intellectual homophily”: people with similar backgrounds and views clustering together, validating each other’s perspectives while systematically excluding alternatives.

For young scholars, the message is clear: to advance your career, you need to publish in a narrow set of top journals. To publish in these top journals, you need to frame your research in ways that align with what gatekeepers at elite institutions want to see. Innovative approaches that challenge dominant paradigms? Research centered on non-Western contexts? Work drawing on alternative theoretical traditions? Good luck getting that published.

The vicious cycle is obvious. Scholars at elite institutions publish in top journals. This boosts their institutions’ prestige. Which attracts more talented students and faculty. Who publish more papers. And so on. Meanwhile, researchers from other institutions— especially in the Global South — find themselves locked out, regardless of the quality or relevance of their work.

Elite concentration is actually getting worse

Here’s where it gets really concerning. You might think these problems would ease over time as economics globalises and democratises. But the opposite is happening.

In 2024, Richard Freeman, Danxia Xie, Hanzhe Zhang, and Hanzhang Zhou published a study entitled “High and Rising Institutional Concentration of Award-Winning Economists”. The study compares institutional concentration across academic disciplines. They looked at around 6,000 prizewinners from 18 areas of the natural sciences, engineering and social sciences. Their finding? Economics stands alone in becoming more concentrated over time.

The key passage from their research is worth reading in full:

The world’s most renowned economists work for the most part at a few elite US universities (Harvard, University of Chicago, MIT, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, UC Berkeley and Columbia University). Nobel laureates in economics spend on average half of their academic time at these eight institutions, which account for only three per cent of all institutions with internationally renowned academic awards. Interestingly, the concentration in all other fields is low and tending to decline, suggesting that knowledge production in science is generally becoming more decentralised.

Let that sink in. While other disciplines are becoming more decentralised — spreading excellence across more institutions — economics is moving in the opposite direction. Nobel laureates in economics spend half their time at just eight universities.

This isn’t just about prestige. It’s about whose questions get asked, whose methods get legitimized, and whose perspectives shape the discipline. As economics becomes more concentrated, it becomes less capable of addressing the diverse economic challenges facing most of the world.

Problems that don’t fit the dominant paradigm get less attention. Questions obvious to those outside elite institutions go unasked. Methods that might yield valuable insights but don’t align with mainstream approaches remain unexplored.

There’s also an international dimension here that often gets overlooked. Yes, elite American economics departments attract talented students from around the world. But these students receive training that emphasises problems, contexts, and solutions rooted in developed Western economies. When they return home or take positions elsewhere, they carry assumptions and frameworks that often don’t translate well to different economic contexts.

Economics is rooted in Eurocentric assumptions

One the most fundamental critiques comes from scholars working to decolonize economics. In their 2025 book, “Decolonizing Economics: An Introduction”, Devika Dutt, Carolina Alves, Surbhi Kesar, and Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven make the argument that mainstream economics is built on Eurocentric and colonial assumptions that render it “ill-equipped to tackle critical questions, such as structural racism, uneven development, the climate crisis, labour relations, and how structural power shapes economic outcomes.”

This goes beyond complaints about concentration or gatekeeping. It challenges the very foundations of how economics understands the world.

Here’s their core argument:

Decolonizing economics entails challenging the norms of neutrality and objectivity that economists claim to speak from, while fostering alternative ways of understanding the economy that take seriously structural power relations and contemporary processes of economic development. Readers will come to understand the political stakes of decolonization and the wide range of scholarship that already exists that can help us grasp economics from non-Eurocentric perspectives.

The problem, as Dutt and her colleagues show, is that dominant economic theories emerged from specific historical contexts in Western Europe and North America. Yet they’re presented as universal truths applicable everywhere. This erases the diverse economic systems, practices, and forms of knowledge that exist in other parts of the world.

Think about the concepts economics takes for granted. What counts as “development”? What economic activities get measured and valued? The answers embedded in mainstream economics reflect Western historical experiences and priorities. They often marginalise or pathologize economic practices in formerly colonised regions.

The concentration of economic authority in elite Western institutions reinforces these biases. When most influential economists are trained at a handful of American and European universities, and when these same institutions control the discipline’s publication and reward structures, alternative perspectives struggle to gain recognition.

Indigenous economic knowledge? Non-Western theoretical frameworks? Insights from scholars in the Global South? They remain marginalised, dismissed as insufficiently “rigorous” or “scientific”— according to standards defined by the very institutions whose dominance is being challenged.

What needs to change

These problems — elite dominance, editorial gatekeeping, rising institutional concentration, and Eurocentric foundations — feed off one another. They create a self-reinforcing system that resists change. But recognising these patterns is the first step toward fixing them.

The Nobel Prize pattern should prompt uncomfortable questions. Why do so few institutions produce virtually all recognised excellence in economics? Is this really about merit? Or is it evidence of structural barriers that prevent talented scholars from other backgrounds and institutions from gaining recognition? What perspectives and insights are we losing when economic authority concentrates in such a narrow set of places?

The answers matter because economics isn’t just an academic exercise. It shapes policy decisions affecting billions of lives. When the discipline is dominated by a small elite trained in similar ways at similar institutions, the policies that result reflect only a narrow range of perspectives and priorities.

We need to fundamentally rethink what economics is, who it serves, and how economic knowledge should be produced.

This means:

• Creating genuine pathways for scholars from diverse institutions and backgrounds to contribute to economic discourse

• Recognising forms of economic knowledge and inquiry beyond the narrow methodological orthodoxy that currently dominates

• Taking seriously the insights of scholars working to decolonize economics and center perspectives from the Global South

• Breaking down the disciplinary silos that isolate economics from other social sciences

The Nobel Prize pattern isn’t just a curiosity. It’s a warning sign pointing toward deep structural problems that limit what economics can be and what it can achieve. Until these problems are confronted directly, the field will continue reproducing the same hierarchies, marginalising the same voices, and reinforcing the same narrow vision of economic inquiry.