…a group of economists at George Mason University, and other
prominent researchers, say this notion of a free-market mainstream is
oversimplified at best and inaccurate at worst.“There’s really not any data, and there’s a caricature, that
economists are extremely free market,” said Tyler Cowen, a professor of
economics at George Mason who is popular in free-market and libertarian
circles. “I think the differences are overdrawn.”
My colleague Daniel Klein, the central focus of this article, has shown that economists’ views are quite mainstream and often closely aligned with the Democratic Party:
And Klein has numbers to back up his claims. Some of those numbers come in the form of party donations, similar to studies (some of which have also been done by Klein at George Mason) purporting to show political bias among professors in academe: For example, one Econ Journal Watch study
found a 5.1 to 1 ratio between contributors to the Democratic versus
Republican party among a sample of 2,000 members of the AEA. Klein
found similar lopsidedness in the authors and editors of journals
(including the Journal of Economic Literature) and even within the groups of people listed in authors’ acknowledgments in journal articles.
Read the whole thing, which also includes a debunking of the notion of heterodox economics. Often the real dissent in economics comes from the free market side; left-wing heterodoxy is more aligned with the mainstream than it cares to admit. The piece closes with some me:
“So, everyone in a debate always wants to call the other side
ideologues, essentially, and the critics of economics are doing that
here,” Cowen explained. “They like to think they’re on the outside,
there’s something new, they’re warring against some powerful authority.”About theories that run counter to the neoclassical model, he said, “It’s a view that’s been with us for centuries.”
Does this mean that the vast left-wing conspiracy in academia applies even to economists? I’m shocked!
Perhaps the real question should be, given that “economists’ views are quite mainstream and often closely aligned with the Democratic Party”, how come the popular perception is of economics as a hot-bed of free-market fundamentalism? As a non-economist I certainly get that perception of economists’ views.
I suspect the disconnect comes from two frequent claims by vocal free-market economists.
The first is that the virtues of free markets are a unique insight of economics as a discipline.
The second is that “people respond to incentives – with surprising results!” is an insight unique to economics as a discipline.
That is, while some economists with mainstream views may support radical ideas such as a legal minimum wage or minimum rental standards, they don’t preface that support with “Economics shows…” Meanwhile too many of those who oppose such ideas _tend_ to draw on Economics 101 arguments and the assumed pervasiveness of moral hazard to argue that “it may seem that a legal minimum wage would be good for poor people, but if you think about it (!) economics shows that there’s another side to the coin”.
The Republican economic platform is more “economic” than the Democratic platform. If you look at the Republican candidates, there’s someone talking about the inflation tax (Ron Paul), a sales tax to replace income taxes (Huckabee), the elimination of capital gains for everyone who isn’t rich (Romney). Those positions by themselves are not persuasive without an understanding of economics.
Free market economists have an undue influence because they are seated closer to the center of power. Of course, Rubin and others had a similar effect on Clinton, who basically accepted the Republican tax cuts in the mid-90′s, but he didn’t campaign on those issues.
Nice posting and links, tks.
One question? There’s no such thing as heterodoxy in economics? Yet there is such a thing as “real dissent”? Explanation, please?
When you consider that the bulk of those in the MSM (cue shut down of brain by “economic leftists” reading this right about now) and academia are radically to the left of America in general, it ought to be no surprise that they view a ratio of about 5.1 “economic leftists” to 1 “economic rightist” as far too skewed in favor of the right.
Only if economists were roughly 95-99% in tune with the left wing of the Democratic Party would the economics profession as a whole be deemed a “normal” ratio of left to right.
It’s of course entirely compatible for economists to be Democrats and free-market, too. After all, as today’s WSJ finally admitted, the Republican Party does not practice smart economic policies, and hasn’t, for years.
It is a good point to mention, Tyler, that compared to the world at large, American political parties are remarkably friendly to free market policies, even the Democrats. Nonetheless, Republicans tend to be more in line with economists than Democrats.
The quoted 5-to-1 statistic is downright misleading. While it is true that economic faculty tend to vote Democrat, the full story is that they do so much less than in other social sciences. Thus the full data point to the opposite conclusion. Here is a paper by Klein himself about voting patterns in different departments:
http://www.criticalreview.com/2004/pdfs/klein_stern.pdf
As an outsider to the economic thinkers circle I have recently developed a tendency to be impressed with economic insights. Emily Oster, a University of Chicago economist, looks at the stats on AIDS in Africa and comes up with a stunning conclusion. Yes, one of those from that school This seems to the less-than-initiated as the ‘physics” of economics as opposed to the politics of economics both external with the political parties and internal among the academic corridors. Both you and the article you cite by Andy Guess frame the debate as to which side of the fence one stands. Quoting Andy Guess, “Some have favored, for instance, a higher minimum wage.” as a way of classifying the opposition. But my reading shows the difference as being one of methodologies and basic premises. Whether or not this turn out to be truer is a matter of empirical demonstration. “So, everyone in a debate always wants to call the other side ideologues (as in not my side), essentially, and the critics of economics (those other guys) are doing that here,† Cowen explained. “They like to think they’re on the outside, there’s something new, they’re warring against some powerful authority.† Your very statement puts them on the outside of economics and sets your viewpoint up as the authority. Andy Guess quoting again in his
article, As Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz put it, the dominance of the neoclassical model is a “triumph of ideology over science.†
They were never based on solid empirical and theoretical foundations, and even as many of these policies were being pushed, academic economists were explaining the limitations of markets — for instance, whenever information is imperfect, which is to say always.† In an e-mail, Klein called this characterization “simply untrue”: Friedman and other like-minded theorists simply believed that “in most instances, free markets are less bad than the alternative.† I may not have had a deeper insight from taking a class from Professor Friedman but he certainly portrayed what is Professor Stiglitz impression on his TV programs. As a spectator watching from the bleachers this has hardly decided the debate.
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