Steven Landsburg's new book, More Sex is Safer Sex gets a solid review in tomorrow's NYT (permalink). Perhaps for journalistic reasons, the review couches More Sex as an example of economists conquering other fields, which the reviewer traces to 1996 when Landsburg first began writing his Slate.com column (although, oddly, there's no mention of The Armchair Economist from 1993), in which he explained for the everyman a subtle (and technical) economic theory relating more sex with less spread of AIDS. The review goes on:

This research was one of the early examples of the economics profession’s imperialist movement. For the last decade or so, economists have been increasingly poking their fingers into other disciplines, including epidemiology, psychology, sociology, oenology and even football strategy. These economists usually justify their expansionism on two grounds: They say they’re better with numbers than most other researchers and have a richer understanding of how people respond to incentives. Arrogant as this sounds, there is some truth to it. Besides, the public seems hungry for the kind of real-world social science economists are practicing.

In general, I agree wholeheartedly that it's a good time to be an economist. A decade ago, economists answering the cocktail party standard "what do you do?" would get either "oh, I hated my econ class in college" or "oh, what's the stock market gonna do?" These days, it's more likely to be "so do you think foreign aid works?" or, at least, "so what do you think of that book, what's it called, Freakonomics?" A world where the likes of Tyler Cowen, Hal Varian, Greg Mankiw, Steven Landsburg et al. add influence to public opinion is likely to be a better world. (Although I know people who complain that economics has become largely a parlor game of high intellects matching wits rather than producing ideas...but that's probably another post.)

That said, economic imperialism is, of course, nothing new. In the 1950's a slew of subdisciplines emerged within economics, largely defined by the new territory each was charting. Becker et al. took over sociology. Buchanan, Tullock et al. conquered politics. Coase, Posner and Calabresi the law. North, Fogel et al. history. And Friedman reclaimed economics proper. The movements were so exciting at the time that British economic journalist Henri Lepage furiously toured America to visit these intellectual imperialists, and wrote an economics book for the everyman that has become a classic, Tomorrow Capitalism, published in 1978. (See Frederic Sautet on this.)

As for sex, no frontier there either. It was in 1992 that Richard Posner published his unforgettable Sex and Reason. And Peter Boettke's review, "Good Economics, Bad Sex, and Even Worse Philosophy" (recent post by Pete here.), appeared soon after. Heck, my old colleague Jeff Rous published his 1997 dissertation on---and I'm serious---breastfeeding.

So I think it's missing the point to cast as "imperialist" the recent spate of economics books for popular consumption. The point is, economists have gotten a lot better at communicating the ideas that get produced at high levels of intellectual rigor. This changes things, both for the reader (and his/her opinions)...

At his best, Landsburg helps us see the world in new ways and confront some of our assumptions. In one chapter, he argues that you should give all your charitable donations to the single cause you deem most worthy. If you think the most important thing you can do is help a starving child by giving $100 to CARE, you should give all your donations to CARE. Your first $100 is not going to cure hunger, and the next $100 you could give — money that might now be going to another cause — will help just as many children. When I started reading the chapter, I was rolling my eyes. When I finished it, I couldn’t decide how I felt.

...and also it changes things for the economics author, for whom the effective communication bar has been raised.

Still, I suspect this book will command a much smaller audience than some of the economics-tinged best sellers, mostly because it is short on the nuance that comes from real human stories. Landsburg’s characters tend toward the hypothetical — Benny the Burglar and Manny the Mugger; Jane the A student and Mary the B student; Albert and Alvin, two imperfect altruists — and his arguments, as he puts it at one point, can sound like “idle Sunday dorm-room chitchat.”

A generation ago Dierdre McCloskey rightly chastised economists for their terrible writing skills. It's healthy for the discipline and the market for ideas that economists have begun to compete in communicating to broader audiences. (In my opinion, David Theroux and The Independent Institute have been doing that for more than a decade now.) So I say kudos to Levitt, Harford, Landsburg, Wheelan, Lott, et al., and who ever else finds ways to effectively communicate and entertain with economics ideas. Prove your theorems, bootstrap your standard errors, and THEN TELL YOUR STORY!!!