Why am I Wrong about Economics?
 

Recently I've been arguing about economics in comment threads at Brad Delong and Crooked Timber. (Below are a number of links gleaned from those threads). The most immediately interesting thing that came from these debates was evidence (here and here) for a claim that I've heard several times before. Apparently, contrary to my oft-stated opinion, economists are not usually right wing and are liberals or Democrats more often than not.

I've been brainstorming this discrepancy and have come up with several possible explanations, some of them explaining why I'm wrong, and some of them showing that I really might be right. Further research is required. 

Why might I be wrong? Perhaps it's because the profession has changed since I took econ 38 years ago, so that my experience is obsolete. Perhaps I've been running into low-class out-of-date gutter economists who are quite different than real economists. Perhaps Chicago School economists and libertarians are disproportionately represented in the public-intellectual and journalistic economics which I most often encounter. And finally, just because a high proportion of right-wingers are economists, we can't conclude that a high proportion of economists are right-wingers. My reliance on anecdotal personal experience may have misled me.

Some of the explanations why I'm wrong don't quite work, however. It has been suggested that introductory economics tends to be more schematic and more right wing than advanced economics, and that standard-average econ teachers tend to be unaware of the latest  developments in the field. However, since econ graduates are the most important output of the econ industry, and since the mis-education of large numbers of 22-year-olds is one of my main complaints about the biz, this defense fails. It's really the median-modal economist and the median-modal econ B.S. that I'm talking about, and not necessarily the cutting edge of the field.

The last group of explanations basically confirms my prejudice. Maybe academic economists are more liberal than equally-qualified economists working in government or in the business world. Economists, like engineers, can earn much more money outside academia, and the ones who stay in academia might be the less economically-oriented, more liberal ones. Second, the surveys seemed to count libertarians as half-liberal, but "liberal" in my argument means "economic liberals" (not anti-tax, not anti-regulation), so libertarians don't count. I suspect that leaving out the social-liberal questions would have shown that economists mostly range from moderate /  conservative Democrats to hard-right Republicans, with a fair number of libertarians and no more than 10% economic liberals by my standards.

A troubling possibility is that the centrists who claim to be liberals think that anyone to the left of them is either insane or a Communist. During the Clinton triangulation administration Krugman and DeLong spoke pretty viciously about the non-centrist Democrats, and you sometimes wonder whether the old liberals (15-20% of the US electorate)  have been disappeared from American life. The appropriation of the "liberal" label by centrists would just be the final ratification of the defeat of old liberalism.

During the Bush administration I have liked Krugman and DeLong -- during the Clinton administration, not so much. Hopefully the next president will be a Democrat, and I can go back to having doubts about those two guys. If things turn out that way, I'll be happier, and so will they.

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Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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