With great performativity comes great responsibility? Rethinking the role of economists

The dissemination of economic models and predictions can affect social outcomes; this is roughly what has been called the ‘performativity of economics.’ For example, consider an economist's prediction of a bank failure, which may turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy contributing to a bank run. Recent contributions have argued that economists have responsibility towards the performative effects they cause. We argue that a more complex picture emerges once we make explicit widely acknowledged conditions for moral responsibility that are currently only implicitly alluded to in the literature. Towards this aim, we highlight four factors relevant for assessing the responsibility of economists, and systematically explore the impact of their different conceptualizations and specifications for assigning moral responsibility for performative effects: 1. the foreseeability of the performative effect in question, 2. its causal strength, 3. the degree to which causal control is distributed, and 4. how we conceptualize the social role of economists.