The Effective Altruism community inherits the problems of the economics profession

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When you scroll through the Effective Altruism Forum you’ll find lots of economic analyses.
There is a tag for Economics with 161 posts, as well as one for Economic growth (130 posts), Economic inequality (10 posts), Economics of artificial intelligence (28 posts), Welfare economics (17 posts), Tax Policy (21 posts), Markets for altruism (33 posts) and many other subcategories.

Now I really like economics and I love economic analyses, but I think it’s very surprising how little presence the other social sciences have. The Social science tag only has 27 posts and there is no tag for sociology, anthropology, gender studies, geography, political science, or many other social sciences.

When you look at the People page of the EA forum, you’ll find lots of economists (and entrepreneurs) but almost no other social scientists. You will also notice that the vast majority of the people on this page are white men. This has been this way for a long time; this is what the page looked like a year ago:

I myself removed Elon Musk and SBF from this page, but don’t worry, this post will focus on the dangers of overrelying on economics, not on overrelying on capitalists (although they are related).

So what might those dangers be, and why is EA so stringent in its use of other disciplines? Well, those things are related too; economics is extremely insular. Other social studies make a lot of attempts to integrate themselves with all the other social sciences. This makes it so that learning about one discipline also teaches you about the other disciplines. Economists, meanwhile, have a tendency to see their discipline as better than the others, starting papers with things like:

Economics is not only a social science, it is a genuine science. Like the physical sciences, economics uses a methodology that produces refutable implications and tests these implications using solid statistical techniques.

In the paper "The Superiority of Economists" by Fourcade et al, economists were found to be the only group that thought interdisciplinary research was worse than research from a singular field:

Furthermore, they looked at top papers from political science, economics and sociology. They found that political science and sociology cited economics papers many times more than the other way around:

This lack of citing other social sciences was later confirmed by Angrist et al:

Given the complex interdisciplinary nature of societal issues, studying the basics of economics might make you overconfident that you can solve societal problems.
Take, for example, supply and demand. The standard supply and demand model will tell you that having/increasing the minimum wage will automatically increase unemployment. But if we look at actual empirical evidence it shows us that it doesn't. Overrelying on simple economic models might mislead us about which policies will actually help people, while a more holistic look at the social sciences as a whole may counter that.

Furthermore, by focusing our recruitment on only a couple disciplines, we inherit the demographic problems of those disciplines. It is no wonder then that, just like the EA community, economics is also very homogeneous. Only 29% of the EA community are women:

While 76% are white:

Bayer and Rouse show us that minorities are given fewer degrees in economics than other disciplines:

As are women:

They also get only 13.7% of the authorship of economics papers, are less likely to get tenure in their first academic job compared to men, and face a lot of discrimination in general. An AEA survey found that half of women say they were treated unfairly because of their sex and almost half say they've avoided conferences/seminars out of fear of harassment.
If we look at the other two popular disciplines in EA, philosophy and computer science, we’ll see that they have similar issues with underrepresentation and discrimination.

If we want to avoid these issues, I suggest we start reading and recruiting more from other disciplines too.