1. Social science matters. If we predict inflation wrong, or mistake what causes development, we screw up the world. (Hello Gunnar Myrdal.)
Therefore, if there’s a tradeoff between a nice atmosphere and getting things right, we should always prefer getting things right.
2. There is a rightness-maximizing level of savagery, which is strictly positive.
Bad ideas must be challenged. Sometimes bad ideas get entrenched. Then they must be challenged loudly and persistently.
Fields where this doesn’t happen tend to degenerate into back-scratching cliques. (Hello, humanities.)
Now clearly there is some level of savagery which is TOO savage. If you destroy a PhD student’s confidence, that’s hurtful and you’ve lost their future contributions. Aggression from the top can be used to defend entrenched but mistaken ideas.
And there’s certainly toxic behaviour in economics. I’ve seen it and experienced it!
3. Nevertheless, overall, econ does better at removing bad ideas than other social sciences. Our models can be critiqued… other soc scis often just have verbal models which are too vague to be wrong! Our focus on good research design to uncover causality is stronger than many other fields, also.
Lastly:
4. There’s more than one kind of toxicity.
There are many stories of bad abuses of power - eg sexual harassment - in supposedly “warm”, and highly feminist, fields like Eng Lit. Doubtless there are many reasons for any differences between fields. But I think one underestimated factor is that when there’s no ruthless, hard-faced empirical rigour, when theories are vague and evidence is narrative, then getting published comes to depend on academic politics - on alliances and cliques. That is a fertile breeding ground for abuse of power.