Ira Katznelson is this respected?

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I just finished Fear Itself, his book on the Roosevelt-Truman years. My final reaction was, “Well written, interesting perspective, looks at political economy with about as much sophistication as Occupy Wall Street.” I looked him up to see if he had any connection to the Occupy movement, figuring he might be the sort of fringe professor who would get into it.

Boy, was I off. He is a major force in the academic world. Past President of the American Political Science Association. Current head of the Social Science Research Council. Fear Itself was recently awarded the Bancroft Prize.

I keep forgetting that it is people whose views of political economy resemble mine who are on the fringe in academia.

As for my disagreements with Katznelson, I barely know where to start. He acknowledges the consensus that Roosevelt’s National Recovery Act was a failure, but he has no idea why. He seems to think that it would have worked had it been better executed.

The view of most economists is that the last thing the American economy needed in the Depression was government-organized industry cartels, which is what the NRA was all about. In Randall Parker’s book interviewing economists on the Great Depression, even James Tobin said that Roosevelt was “lucky” that the Supreme Court invalidated the NRA. Of course, Tobin is a Keynesian, and Keynes is too far to the right for Katznelson, who is very sorry that “fiscal policy” took the place of “planning” as the main tool of government for managing the economy.

I found the book valuable. Actually better than any of the flawed books of 2014 (it was published in 2013). I plan to write a longer review, which will focus on Katznelson’s analysis of the politics of the period.

But right now I am sitting here dumbfounded that someone can attain such lofty professional status and be so clearly ignorant of Public Choice theory or the Knowledge Problem.

One possibility is that everyone is intellectually isolated nowadays. Everybody stays within their own bubble. But I doubt that. Conservatives and libertarians did not ignore Rawls. They did not ignore Piketty.

Instead, I think this reflects the ease with which someone on the left can obtain high status in academia, and the corresponding difficulty for those on the right. If you’re on the right, you have to demonstrate awareness of important left-wing academic ideas, or you will be will be widely denounced as an ignoramus. But the converse is not true. I would bet that I am the first person to dare to suggest that Katznelson suffers from ignorance.

9 thoughts on “Ira Katznelson is this respected?”

  1. I still don’t understand what it is that poly sci professors do. They tell stories. Write descriptive (with a mostly left-wing narrative) about history. Some do polling. You need a Ph.D. for that?… I guess you might just so other people will take you seriously.

    • That’s a keeper. Thanks. But I feel i and all the people I read roughly knew that. I didn’t know the name of Duverger’s law, but ive been a condorcet enthusiast for 20 years.

      I’ve come to the point of giVing up on harping on voting experimentation. Maybe poly Sci people have too whice is why I never heard about it from them.

      And I’m a layman so I feel people should know way more than I do, but after exploring 15 years while the specialists have been specializing that may or may not be realistic.

    • This article is useful in general, but I found within it this gem:

      “Liberals believe the government has an important role to
      play in managing the economy, and conservatives do not.”

      Oh. Really.

      That characterization of conservatives in that sentences is about as realistic as describing contemporary liberals as wanting to abolish private property.

      Why do otherwise intelligent people on the Left write nonsense like this?

  4. Maybe they only hear and believe their colleagues’ dismissives. If I only heard and believed my preacher’s descriptions I’d probably never investigate other religions. Now what if I was paid by my preacher! We need a general theory of academic polization (that’s not a typo).

  5. Expecting a political scientist to be knowledgeable about economics is like expecting an evangelical preacher to be knowledgeable about evolution. For similar reasons.

  6. Acadamia

    While there are some true scholars (those attempting to connect bits of information into knowledge) such as Emanuel Todd to be found there, the communities have taken on one or two characteristics ( or a mixture) of largely “guild-like” organization and hierarchies or “trade union-like” political structures; both becoming self-perpetuating, but decaying.

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