David Colander on the Economics Profession

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Timothy Taylor points to an interesting series of essays by Colander. Self-recommending*. I was drawn to the one on Harvard-MIT incest.

What I’m saying is that modern mainstream economists seem to lack the all-round wisdom reflective of the great policy integrators of the past, such as Bob Solow, Charlie Kindleberger, Charles Goodhart, Paul Samuelson, Art Okun, Jim Tobin, Herb Stein, and Paul Streeten, to name just a few.

I agree that there is a generation gap. More recent generations take their own work much too seriously. I think that economists offer interpretations of reality, and alternative interpretations often have as much validity. I think that the older economists understood this, even if they did not explicitly articulate it. Subsequent generations lost this wisdom.

He goes on,

Modern mainstream economics is a bit off as a result of too much inbreeding. Specifically, my argument is that the gene pool of economists in the replicator dynamics of the profession is too small to prevent undesirable recessive traits from showing up in mainstream economists from time to time.

Recall that I describe Stan Fischer as the Genghis Khan of macroeconomics, because essentially every macroeconomist is descended from him.

*self-recommending is a Tyler Cowen term, which I recall he defined as a project that by virtue of the topic and author is likely to be worth reading.

3 thoughts on “David Colander on the Economics Profession”

  2. I would add that the intellectual inbreeding described by David Colander may also be applicable to the field of climate science. I say this as neither a proponent of, nor “denier” of climate change. Just as a dispassionate observer of the debate. By the way, I am a finance professional, not a climate scientist.

  3. The lack of falsifiability would seem to cause a proliferation of ideas. Inbreeding by itself doesn’t seem strong enough to cause a dearth of ideas.

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