The other day I blogged about Paul Seabright’s Princeton in Europe lecture, about the reasons so few people noticed the oncoming Euro crisis. I’ve only just dipped into his new book, [amazon_link id=”0691133018″ target=”_blank” ]The War Between the Sexes[/amazon_link]. The book is glowingly reviewed by Jonathan Ree in the Guardian today. He describes it as “witty, informative and cogent.”

But here was a line that stopped me short:

“Seabright is an economist by trade, though some of his colleagues regard him as an oddball, even a miscreant.”

That’s bizarre. Nobody I know – and that’s a lot of economists – regards him as an oddball economist. On the contrary, he’s a hugely respected microeconomist working at one of Europe’s leading industrial economics research centres. A glance at his website shows – OK, a picture of him wearing a funny hat – but a long list of very serious publications, exactly what you would expect from a serious industrial economics expert, with an interest in interdisciplinary areas.

So I think maybe many non-economists like Ree believe economists they like must by definition be seen as oddball in some way by the rest of the profession, because they have such fixed (and incorrect) ideas about what mainstream economics is like. If you think the norm is a “neoliberal” ideologue obsessed with free markets and austerity, then every normal applied economist is going to look like a maverick.

[amazon_image id=”0691133018″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The War of the Sexes: How Conflict and Cooperation Have Shaped Men and Women from Prehistory to the Present[/amazon_image]