The partisan nature of economists

There is a new 538 article on this, by , and , here is one excerpt:

We first found that an economist’s research area is correlated with his or her political leanings. For example, macroeconomists and financial economists are more right-leaning on average while labor economists tend to be left-leaning. Economists at business schools, no matter their specialty, lean conservative. Apparently, there is “political sorting” in the academic labor market.

A word analysis indicates the most left-leaning phrase is “post Keynesian,” followed by “credit union.”  The most right-leaning phrase is “free banking,” and then “bank note” and “hedge fund.”  Here is some good news:

There’s no evidence that publication decisions are determined by editor ideology.

And yet:

…a left-leaning economist is more likely to report numerical results aligned with liberal ideology (and the same is true for right-leaning economists and conservative ideology)

This won’t be a popular paragraph with everyone:

Policymakers may need to “re-center” economists’ findings by adjusting for ideology. Take the area of tax rates for high earners. The average optimal tax rate reported by economists in our data is 41 percent. Using our model, we can also estimate that these economists as a group are slightly left of center. We can then figure out what optimal top tax rate a hypothetical centrist economist would report: 33 percent.

Here is the authors’ lengthy research paper on all of this (pdf).

For the pointer I thank Bruce Bartlett.

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