It has been argued previously here that John McCain, among others, seems to harbor a pronounced dislike for economists.
Well, you don’t even have to be a politician to hate economists. Via Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing, here’s a fascinating bit from an old paper by Robert Frank, Tom Gilovich (best known for his hot-hand refutation, and this fun book), and Dennis Regan that assesses how economics students perform in cooperation games as compared to other people. It’s not pretty:
A study by Gerald Marwell and Ruth Ames found that students of economics are indeed much more likely to free-ride in experiments that called for private contributions to public goods.
Their basic experiment involved a group of subjects who were given an initial endowment of money, which they were to allocate between two accounts — one “public,” the other “private.” Money deposited in a subject’s private account was returned dollar for dollar to the subject at the end of the experiment. Money deposited in the public account was first pooled, then multiplied by some factor greater than one, and then distributed equally among all subjects.
Under these circumstances, the socially optimal behavior is for each subject to put her entire endowment in the public account. But the individually most advantageous strategy is to put all of it in the private account. The self-interest model predicts that all subjects will follow the latter strategy. Most don’t. Across 11 replications of the experiment, the average contribution to the public account was approximately 49 percent.
It was only in a 12th replication with first-year graduate students in economics as subjects that Marwell and Ames obtained results more nearly consistent with the self-interest model. These subjects contributed an average of only 20 percent of their initial endowments to the public account, a figure significantly less than the corresponding figure for noneconomists.
Among other things, this might explain why:
1. Economists carry a more dyspeptic view of human behavior than nearly anyone else; and
2. Why comments on economics blogs (though not this blog, which is more econ mutt than purebred) tend to be more cutting than average, by a factor of about 8,000.
3. Behavioral lab studies in general should be reviewed skeptically, for the deck can be stacked in oh-so-many ways.
(Hat tip: Therese Odell, and a few others.)
and 
. You can also watch it on 
#1, are you suggesting political bias because McCain was mentioned? Don’t be so touchy, Freakonomics always reference recent stories on related topics.
Do we really need another one?
Jonathan: I rate your comment as approximately 9000x cutting than average; congrats.
It is the tip of the iceberg of evidence that economics persuades us out of our good instincts and leads society astray.
Its great to know that economics makes you a horrible person for the community.
I think game theory and other behavioral games assume people act in their own selfish best interest, but most people won’t know exactly what that option may be. Economic students may have been exposed to these situations before, and if they all know the optimal personal behavior, none will fall for the sucker move of getting undercut in the public pool. Ironically, these same students should know the group optimal behavior, but obviously they are too cynic of human behavior to trust each other and benefit mutually.
The economist did not get the results they expected because they expect everyone to act rationally. This is mainly why economist continue to be wrong, which drives politicians to dislike them. Self-interest is a tough topic to predict beacuse everyone thinks differently.
This games have their loophooles, but in the end they clearly represent a real scenario were everybody acts on their own self-interest and this interest vaires from person to person
#7, I was gonna say they must be libertarians “proving” the efficiency of the free market. Now if only they could form some sort of organization to fix that free-rider inefficiency… Maybe they could even vote on the individuals to lead the organization. Libertarians for big organization!
I think you would see a similar distinction in a lot of games. For example the “Guess 2/3 of the average” where a group of people guess a number between 0 and 100 and the person that is closest to 2/3 of the average of all the guesses wins. The Nash equilibrium is 0, so I think economists would guess lower amounts that a random collection of non-economists, especially if they know they are playing other economists. That is just a theory though.