Wither academic ethics?

If you read David Henderson at EconLog or Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek, you know that a history professor named Nancy MacLean claims to have unearthed some sort of right-wing conspiracy involving James Buchanan, and this has gotten her some play in liberal media. However, David, Don, and other critics have pointed out what appear to be pretty blatant instances of MacLean twisting Buchanan’s words, even to the point of making it sound like he favors X when the full context clearly shows the opposite. My thoughts:

1. If the critics are correct, then MacLean’s breech of ethics is quite serious. If you are going to have an academy that claims to be searching for truth, then people have to play by rules. They have to be as open as possible about caveats to their own work. They have to try to be as fair as possible to those with whom they disagree. They have to strive for honesty and objectivity, even if these ideals may not be attainable.

2. However much I dislike mathematical formalism in economics, I have to say that it does impose some discipline. Maybe you can construct biased models and try to pass them off as scientific, as Paul Romer accused others of doing in his “mathiness” critique. But nobody uses x’s and y’s to conduct hit jobs and character assassination. There are some natural boundaries imposed by sticking to formal models. And when someone like Paul Krugman steps outside of those formal boundaries and writes newspaper columns, you can see the results.

3. James Buchanan won a Nobel Prize. Say what you will about the committee that decides on the prize, they do not sell their votes to the Koch brothers. Every year, they evaluate a body of work that is very difficult for non-economists to understand and very well vetted by other economists.

4. You can teach about methods that an ethical academic can use in research and writing. However, I do not believe that you can teach an unethical person to be ethical by offering a course in ethics. Instead, you have to police ethics. I think that the most important factor is a willingness to police your own side. If some economists in the conservative/libertarian orbit look at MacLean’s work and conclude in writing that it is basically sound, then that could help. Conversely, if some economists in the progressive orbit decide that she has indeed violated scholarly norms and they put that view in writing, then that could help. If neither side concedes, then it’s game over. There will be no such thing as a search for truth any more.

5. Michael Munger’s review describes MacLean’s book as “historical fiction,” and he says that she does a good job of it. But he stops short of hitting the ethical issues hard. I wish that a serious critical review would appear in a major academic journal.

39 thoughts on “Wither academic ethics?

  1. Read Munger’s review again. I think that he hits the ethical issues pretty hard. The review makes her look bad.

  2. It would certainly help if the reviews on the liberal side were from economists. NPR’s review was written by a science fiction writer.

  3. The following is from MacLean’s application for NIH funding (she got $54,000):

    “Through an accidental discovery followed by extensive archival and other original research, I have unearthed ties between states’ rights activists and leading free-market economists that emerged in the late 1950s and traced their subsequent history of alliance building with sometimes surprising partners over the ensuing half century. Where existing works on neoliberalism begin in the 1970s with crises of profitability and public finance, MY WORK ** EXCAVATES** THE PRE-HISTORY OF EARLY AND ONGOING ANTI-DEMOCRATIC **MOTIVES** AND GOALS” [Caps and ** supplied]

    Here is a writer, purporting to “excavate motives,” clearly expressing pre-commitment to confirmation bias.

    That can lead to something more like **excavating** in one’s own ruminatary mental outhouse. There is little doubt what will be found.

  4. These past few days I was in England with the historian Steve Davies (now of the London-based Institute of Economic Affairs). Steve – whose judgment is impeccable – predicts that if a review of MacLean’s book appears in any of the history journals, it will be devastating even if the reviewer is a far-left historian. The only question, says Steve, is if MacLean’s book is judged to be a serious-enough work to warrant such a review.

    Steve tells me that the norm among historians is that getting the facts wrong or twisting them to fit an ideological narrative is a serious no-no regardless of politics.

    • Lie at the behest of the establishment and you will not have to pay a price.” Jimmy Dore, jagoff comedian

    • I would say that if the book gets taken seriously enou by the public (and a glowing NPR review suggests this is the case) someone in the historian community has some kind of duty to write a review.

    • Sounds like MacLean is shaping up to be this decade’s Michael Bellesisles.

    • Also, because there actually is a left-wing conspiracy, but it is called by the names Academia, DNC, public ed, MSM, it gets no coverage relative to a handful of right wing academics and two rich brothers.

      • My radical, secret, nefarious plan for radical tramsformation revolution of America is The Constitution and The Declaration, YMMV.

        • Does the idea that bureaucrats aren’t altruists require a conspiracy? It is kind of an embarrassment that it had to be pointed out at all, let alone that it could found entire programs and win modern awards.

      • Public education? The mainstream media? Then practically by definition it’s no conspiracy. This is where libertarianism comes off sounding like the ravings of a cult.

          • By the way, where is anything I said about libertarianism?

            This is about public choice, a concept to which the mainstream says “huh?” and we say “no duh.”

            It isn’t libertarianism, except in the sense that gravity and entropy are as well. It is just how the world works.

        • CNN producer admitted privately the Russia conspiracy theory was BS, so yeah, that is the definition of a conspiracy.

          Quit goofing around and pay attention.

        • I have even provided a theory on this. These national level persuasion institutions are biased to national level topics, which is inherently leftist and vignettes of interesting oddities which are biased towards social justice.

          They thus leave out the middle ground which would be where conservatism resides.

  5. This an example of something I call the Expert Concern Troll Laymen Trick. The layman does not know that what the critic is describing is probably just the way things work. But if the critic gets too famous, people can do the same back to him/her.

    • Even casual observers of the insiders know it is BS if one is implicating Tyler Cowen.

  6. For a while I thought it was terrible the the public lost confidence in polite society’s institutions. I was wrong. It is worse. It was the institutions that have lost their respectability.

  7. I have a theory for you. Because they are simply unaware that capital formation is a thing and are fixated on consumerism, they don’t have the ability to see that wanting to keep and invest resources can be anything but avarice, and respectable institutions adding support must be a conspiracy.

  8. On the one hand, yeah, I sure wish her attack was so much better. But on the other hand, it does kinda feel like looking a gift horse in the mouth. As Buchanan’s biggest fan, I’m super attuned to how much coverage he usually gets. Usually he receives barely any coverage. He’s pretty much entirely ignored. Then again, I’m saying this as his biggest fan.

    When MacLean’s book came out, Buchanan received more attention than all the attention that he’s received since his passing. This might be an exaggeration but you get my point.

    From my perspective, none of her critics gave her nearly enough love. They didn’t praise her for choosing to attack Buchanan. As far as I know, she’s the only liberal who has written a book that’s substantially about him. Again I wish it was so much better… but doing so does feel really greedy.

    My other issue is that most, if not all, of her critics strongly denied her claim that Buchanan’s work is anti-democratic. In this regard, she’s entirely correct and her critics are entirely incorrect. They really squandered the opportunity to share and explain Buchanan’s super solid arguments against democracy. As far as I know, no other economist has written nearly as much as he did about the importance of replacing fiscal illusion with fiscal equivalence.

    • Heh. Instead of Barnum’s “there’s no such thing as bad publicity, ” now it’s “there’s no such thing as bad fake history.”

Comments are closed.