Economics as Political Indoctrination
(etc.)
 

I recently engaged in a long and messy debate at Crooked Timber and Unfogged (comments) during which I was repeatedly accused of misunderstanding contemporary economics and overstating its conservative bias. I'm still figuring out what I think about all this, but here are a few speculations about why my opinions are so divergent from those of several others.

  • First, it's possible that my adversaries think of the right wing of the Democratic Party as leftist, whereas I think of the right wing of the Democratic Party as centrist. According to a link below, 3 out of 4 academic economists are Democrats. Another guy, however, put DeLong and Krugman in the "central 80%" of the profession, which tends to confirm my opinion that economists range from the center-left to the far right, with marginalized "leftists" making up only 10%.

  • Second, I am an agèd man handicapped by my long term view, and it's possible that some of the things I'm thinking of come from decades ago. All my life I've been hearing right-wing arguments from economists,  with a certain number of centrists chiming in, but perhaps things have changed.
     

  • Third, perhaps conservative economists just make more noise in the public sphere than their numbers would lead you to expect. The economists who show up in the media tend to be libertarians,  Chicago School, or "Law and Economics" spokesmen. Or to put it differently, while a high proportion of right-wingers are economists or think economically, this does not necessarily mean that a most economists are right-wingers.
     

  • Fourth, a considerable proportion of the profession works outside the universities -- in think tanks and in the business world. This squares with one explanation of "the liberal university". Conservatives, especially free-marketers, have a devotion to the dollar grounded not only on normal greed, but also on deep conviction. So the poor slumps willing to work for a mere sixty grand a year might be mostly liberals (or at least Democrats.)

Economists, even the nice ones, remain loyal to their biz. They all seem baffled by the hostility they receive, and the consensus seems to be that none of the critical books I'm reading are worth much, and that there really are no serious problems with economics. I am often told that the horrible examples I mention really are not typical and don't represent the profession -- but the odious Becker got his Nobel Prize only fourteen years ago. I also doubt that the problem is that the right-wingers talking about economics haven't taken enough economics, because there are plenty of rightwing economics PhDs. (The original question, after all, was something like "Why does introductory economics seem so much like rightwing indoctrination?") Anyway, I'm not really willing to let people purge the sample in order to get more congenial results.

My subjective multi-anecdotal impression of economists is still that they are country-club conservatives / neoliberals characterized by bland smugness, an uncomprehending indifference toward the sub-middle-class, and the cheeky assurance that economists are the only ones who really know anything, and the only ones who really care about about poverty. To me the most notable point this study is that economists as a group are more optimistic about the future than any other group --  even the richest and most secure non-economists. I can't help but think that some of the calmness that tenured academic economists feel in the face of creative destruction comes from the fact that none of them are at all at risk -- they're not on the market.

Radek:

My whole premise is to look at economics from the outside without becoming an economist or learning economics. We all have to do this about lots of things  -- there are no universal specialists. The alternative would be for me to take economics as True, based on my own understanding of what the economic consensus is (an understanding which would be as ignorant as my critical understanding now is).

An external look at physics and chemistry shows them to be powerful and unproblematic, with a very strong internal consensus on most questions, so I have basically taken them as given. Same for evolutionary biology -- I've looked in on some of the controversies there (Gould vs. Conway Morris, Dennett and Dawkins), and the two sides don't seem very far apart, and both sides are pretty acceptable.

When I look at economics, I don't find that consensus. I find a lot of loose ends and implausible statements, and I also find a lot of credentialed and tenured economists who are troubled about the state of the field. Since I am not too friendly to economics anyway, for a variety of mostly-political reasons, I read their critical books.

I do change my mind about things from time to time, but the only way I can get a response by throwing things out there. I can't take everything I am told for given, however. For example, when I meet a law-of-the-jungle social Darwinist, he's got an economics background far more often than he has a biology background. And when you look at economic analyses, where labor is a cost to be minimized, where reductions in the labor force are always a good thing if productivity remains the same, and where unproductive persons really have no status, you see that economics does enable social Darwinism. And some of this does come from knowledgeable  people (and not just the semi-educated), even if the leaders of the field have learned to pull in their horns for various reasons.

For example, even if everything turns well out in the long term and on the whole (according to Kaldor-Hicks), most non-economists (especially if behind the veil of ignorance) find downsizing disturbing. If economists were riffed occasionally, they might understand what these other people are thinking. But economists are never riffed, so they just love creative destruction.


Coda:

Here are the pieces which inspired the threads. The gist is that introductory economics classes teach economics in an unrealistic, schematic form which amounts to indoctrination in right-wing free-market ideology, and that advanced economics mostly consists of kludges and epicycles and jimmies and shims used to mickey-mouse the formal system into something that works.

Ezra Klein Christopher Hayes Mark Thoma Drezner on Hayes

Max Sawicky on related topics Colander on economics education

More links that appeared during the discussions:

Caplan on economists' opinion and public opinion The priority of democracy over markets

Why are economists different? The death of general equilibrium theory

Economists are 3 to 1 Democrats The Policy Views of Social Science Professors

Inside Higher Ed on the Academic Left

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I am emersonj at gmail dot com.

Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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