&gt; Economics is a highly inbred field, which makes it very difficult to transmit cross-disciplinary information.<p>I disagree. Economists pull in work from many other fields: statistics, math, computer science, political science, sociology. Kahneman and Granger are recent Nobel Prize winners that didn&#x27;t have a PhD in economics.<p>&gt; The recent popularity of machine learning in the field might be a rare exception.<p>Not really. Economists were applying neural networks in the 1990&#x27;s, just as one example. The problem is that these ideas often fizzle out because they weren&#x27;t designed for economic data and it turns out that they don&#x27;t provide much value.<p>&gt; Economists only cite other economists.<p>That&#x27;s the real issue. The field of economics is very closed. It&#x27;s even worse than you describe. Not only do you have to cite papers written by economists, you have to cite the right economists, or the referees will stop reading and write a negative report. Getting new approaches into economics is easy if you have connnections within the editorial process that rejects more than 90% of submissions.