The story is here. The link is from Nick Gillespie. I got there via Tyler Cowen.
It seems to me that Nobel Laureates Vernon Smith, Ronald Coase, and Milton Friedman all faced ostracism either at their own institutions or from other academics. Are there comparable left-wing economists who were treated with as much disrespect?
I haven’t looked into it but the first things that come to mind is labeling anyone with left of center views a “commie.” Weren’t academics thought to have left wing views put under surveillance as well? I seem to recall that Chomsky was spied on. Wasn’t Bertrand Russell imprisoned for his pacifism, and wasn’t he ostracized by conservatives for his thought on morals and marriage? And I suppose any number of female academics have been ostracized by their conservative peers.
Sorry, I just realized that I missed the “economists” part of the question.
I think we know the answer to that question. What I’d be interested to know is how the climate at our educational institutions got to be so ugly. How and why did our universities come to be assimilated by and used as a weapon in the progressive movement’s arsenal? It’s a strange thing, isn’t it? On the one hand, I suppose it makes sense that this would happen, given the progressives’ basically sensible desire to save public policy from the nasty business of politics by handing over authority to (real or supposed) experts, many of whom are found in the academy, which thereby aligns the interests of academics and progressives, but still…the sheer scale of this collaboration has to be marvelled at. Crooked timber of humanity is right.
The Coase theorem makes central government a player, not an arbitrator. Much of economic theory, left and right, treats government as a static. Hard to be an economist if you include government as a dynamic player.
Not sure what an appropriate benchmark for ostracism is, but maybe Sam Bowles at Harvard. Also, it didn’t seem like a picnic for other Marxist economists around that time.
Larry Summers?
One great result of that “tenor” of academia (and not just in economics) was:
THINK TANKS
Before the UMass Econ department became radicalized in the mid-70s, Sam Bowles and Michael Best were both pushed out of the department: http://dailycollegian.com/2011/10/24/former-economics-department-chair-katzner-lectures-on-department-changes/
Decades after the publication of The Road to Serfdom Hayek says many economics departments made him physically feel despised for having written the book.