On economists, sociologists, and evil – an anecdote and an insight from Paul Krugman

At the session “The Future of Neoliberalism” at the 2004 American Sociological Association meeting, Paul Krugman recalled a joke by his teacher Jagdish Bhagwati: virtuous economists are reborn as physicists, while wicked ones return as sociologists—an ironic nod to the intellectual difficulty of sociology. Krugman used this remark to highlight a broader point: economics does not possess all the answers, and recognizing its limits is an important lesson for the discipline.