doing an econ PhD no longer means having to worry (or at least, not having to worry nearly as much) about navigating an entrenched old boys’ club of right-wing bullies. That’s a big plus!
As an aside, it’s as if all the writers that I follow on Substack went to the same training seminar, where they were told to make their prose sound conversational. By using exclamations! All the time! It’s annoying!
But I also object to the substance of Smith’s remarks. There was some bullying at MIT when I was there, but it was equal-opportunity bullying. There, even Chicago-influenced professors, notably Stan Fischer and Rudi Dornbusch, were left of center. The professors who had their egos most assaulted and who departed as a consequence were Fischer Black, a libertarian, and Robert Hall, who was to the right of the departmental mean.
My impression is that there is more bullying than ever in economics. White men are the ones being bullied. And conservative economists are an endangered species.
Only after you dismiss hundreds of years of established economic fact…
Falling into the same traps economics has for thousands of years…
Failing to account for the human desire for ownership in favor of MMT…
Will they realize that Adam Smith is still right.
It’s too bad that Noah marred his piece with the part you highlighted. There’s a lot of good content in his piece.
One of the economists in my PhD program sent this piece out to all of the grad students this week and that same line has been under my skin ever since. At the risk of falling into the trap of “someone is wrong on the internet” I did decide to respond not long before I saw your post:
I doubt that all of the bullies were right wing. Even at Chicago in its conservative heyday there was a lot of intellectual diversity. According to Scott Sumner, the faculty mix of Republicans and Democrats was about 50-50 and free-market ideas were vigorously vetted along with more progressive ones. The Coase Theorem is a famous example:
https://www.uchicago.edu/features/20120423_coase/
Yeah, I’m pretty sure the idea that conservatives (and/or libertarians) ever dominated academic economics was a total myth. Most of my econ professors in undergrad were left of center politically (though comparatively pro-free market). Even 50 years ago the neo-Keynesians dominated academic economics. Chicago was very much an outlier. I think what distinguished economics from other disciplines was that it was the only social science field that wasn’t a complete left-wing monoculture. That seems to be what Smith and others object to.
By contrast, try being a conservative or libertarian in a history or philosophy department in a prestigious university nowadays.
Conservative (or libertarian) economists are already an endangered species in most departments. And there is now ample evidence that the pendulum has swung the other way (if indeed the profession was ever an old boys club of right wing bullies). Arnold is spot on with his last paragraph.
For reference, I am on faculty at an R1 institution. We are not Harvard or MIT; much, much lower on the totem pole. Out of roughly 25 faculty, I suspect that we have 4 faculty in the department who might vote Republican. I say might because these colleagues are not stupid enough to proclaim their political affiliations in public. Only liberals are allowed to do that.
I have also witnessed preferential hiring that if the conditions were reversed would be called discrimination. Not to mention offhand comments from the more liberal faculty that were blatantly discriminatory. Never mind the DEI bureaucrats that use their positions to disseminate explicitly political content. If we’re on the road to sociology, we’re only a few miles out of town.
Scott Sumner, recently made a similar warning of right-wing authoritarians taking over the universities and the media. This is called projection. The left took over the universities and the media, not the right, but apparently Sumner and Smith are convinced of the opposite:
https://www.econlib.org/the-authoritarian-nationalist-playbook/
In the linked article, Sumner says, “But what is authoritarian nationalism? This term has been applied to regimes as dissimilar as the governments of Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Russia, India, China, and Brazil.”
Having criticized identity politics, he says, in the section “Authoritarianism”, “Because of its diversity, the US is not fertile ground for nationalism, but is fertile ground for a left wing version of identity politics.”
ok, my original quoting was unfair. thank you for the correction.
Scott’s a real mess. Trump Derangement Syndrome melts your brain, but I get the impression he’s had a chip on his shoulder over everything long before that.
Economics is no longer mostly about studying the economy but is rather a license to promiscuously interlope in other disciplines without having to bother learning anything about them.
In the best outcomes, practitioners of a discipline can use insights from traditional economics to enrich their discipline. Entomology is a good example.
A worst case example is Marginal Revolution. On the one hand you have Alex Tabarrok fashioning himself a public health expert. Who knows how many thousands of high risk individuals died because they forewent a second vaccination after listening to his “first doses first” policy and were mistakenly led to believe their sacrifice would lead to some other high risk individual getting an opportunity to be vaccinated that they otherwise wouldn’t have had.
And then there is the tens of billions wasted impart due to his test, track and trace hectoring. Testing and contact tracing is pointless in the USA because of its dogmatic insistence on maintaining their “quarantine at home and give it to your family” policy. The majority of transmissions in the USA were and are between family members. https://www.thehealthsite.com/news/household-transmission-of-covid-19-faster-and-wider-than-previously-estimated-new-study-776456/
Needless to say things were quite a bit different in Taiwan and South Korea where the elites display a modicum of competence.
In Taiwan:
“Many local governments began providing options for anyone testing positive to quarantine in a government-provided hotel or facility. The provision of quarantine facilities significantly reduced transmission of the virus within the family, thus reducing the number of cases in the community.”
https://thediplomat.com/2021/07/why-taiwan-is-beating-covid-19-again/
And similarly In South Korea the government made quarantine facilities available:
https://thesoulofseoul.net/2021/07/06/quarantine-in-korea-what-to-expect/#quarantinestations
There is no reason the USA could not have reduced transmission by ending its “spread it to your family” policy and actually improving the efficacy of quarantine, but that wasn’t what Tabarrok’s corporate patrons wanted to hear.
And then on the other hand you have ersatz philosopher-king Cowen who can use Parfit-style mere-addition utilitarianism to assume some future population level to justify any policy option favored by his tech titan patrons. Want to justify trillions in tech energy subsidies? Just hypothesize some welfare cost to some assumed future population size and presto, all your green energy subsidies are more than justified.
Of course I only pick on them because they are the best of the lot on the left. On the right you have a similar utilitarian calculus which basically runs that since there are so many more Chinese than Americans their welfare matters most. Hence you can safely predict a right wing economist’s solution to any policy issue by asking yourself “what would Xi prefer?”
That said most academic disciplines aren’t hurt by having economists looking over their shoulder. But still, the best place to encourage and achieve progress is within the community of doers, manufacturers and engineers. This is what gives China and Korea such an advantage in relative rates of progress achieved.
“Who knows how many thousands of high risk individuals died because they forewent a second vaccination after listening to his “first doses first” policy and were mistakenly led to believe their sacrifice would lead to some other high risk individual getting an opportunity to be vaccinated that they otherwise wouldn’t have had.”
Are you seriously asking how many high-risk people there were who were otherwise going to get second shots had they not been convinced by reading Tabarrok to avoid it, who then got covid they wouldn’t have gotten with a second shot, and died of it?
Who knows? Everybody knows! It’s “zero”.
Well I certainly pray that you are correct. Nevertheless I personally had to call up an elderly aunt and yell at her that she wouldn’t be being selfish if she got her second shot. Talking with cousins I learned that she wasn’t the only one with this attitude. This angers me.
Although not a Marginal Revolution reader, she is part of an elderly religious demographic in the US that is particularly susceptible to the self-sacrifice moralizing that is Marginal Revolution’s stock in trade. A reason why white vaccination rates are lower than Asian rates in the US might well be in part this Christian religious sense of sacrifice which is more common among whites than Asians. Although my Aunt is to the best of my knowledge not a Marginal Revolution reader, she might well have been influenced by other avenues that picked up on the meme.
For one the few times I’m sure Handle is not right:
I don’t know. And I’m not quite excluded from “everybody”.
I’m pretty sure it’s less than 100 (99%) and think it’s about 40% likely to actually be 0.
Nobody knows, and those who claim to know should not be believed.
One of the good points Noah mentions is how Big Data is changing business, and adding to their demand for economists.
I wish there was more daily notices of auto deaths, and heart attack deaths.
I would never have pursued an econ PhD without being encouraged to do so by white male econ professors at college. It certainly wasn’t my idea. There was a large cohort of women in my PhD program, and most of us managed to navigate the ‘entrenched old boys’ club’ one way or another. I pulled through with the help of a male professor who was a bit outside the mainstream. Still, with the benefit of hindsight, I don’t think my undergraduate econ professors did me any favors, despite their good intentions. And I suspect my chances of completing an econ PhD in the present environment would be a lot lower than when I was in grad school.
More details would be interesting on what is outside the mainstream, and what were some of the non-favors.
We need more women economists. As well as viewpoint diversity.
(I’m now reading a lot of Marxist Freddie deBoer’s substack:
The Cult of Smart seems like a more honest leftist than Yglesias.)
It’s a funny question about economics.
For example globalism and international trade is still lionized, and to be “against” so-called free-trade is to be a nationalist neanderthal.
The question of whether globalism leads to lower labor shares of income is rarely addressed.
Similarly it appears that central banks have no way to fight inflation other than reducing, perhaps even incidentally, labor shares of income.
This is also never a topic of discussion..
Leftists ache to be seen as cosmopolitan, international open-minded. But what does open borders for immigration mean for wages in the United States?
And why do leftists never militate for reduced regulation regarding street vending or pushcart vending. But they are deeply, and I say deeply, immersed in identity politics.
Somehow macroeconomics is absorbing the worst of both worlds, left and right.