Two from EconJournalWatch. First, Mitchell Langbert writes,
This paper shows that the AEA is nearly devoid of Republicans, though many Republicans are found among its membership, which remains open to all who pay the membership dues. I find that the political skew increases up the AEA hierarchy. I use voter registration and political contribution data to examine what I call ‘players’—AEA officers, editors, authors, and acknowledgees (that is, those thanked in published acknowledgments). For AEA players, the Democratic:Republican ratio is 13:1 in voter registrations and 81:1 in political contributors.
Second, Jeremy Horpedahl and Arnold Kling quantify the increased focus on issues of gender, race, and inequality in the AEA’s flagship publications.
The 21st century has provided the economics profession with many new topics to consider. These include: outsourcing; supply chain complexity; the issues that the financial crisis of 2008 raised with respect to bank regulation, housing finance, and ‘shadow banking;’ the structure, conduct, and performance of Internet businesses and the policy issues that have arisen; the role of China in the world economy; the rise of artificial intelligence; the opportunities and challenges posed by ‘big data;’ the rise of intangible capital and the increased importance of intellectual property; and changes in U.S. economic geography, with some major cities generating an increased share of income.
With all of these new topics, as well as continued interest in perennial topics in monetary policy, fiscal policy, public finance, economic history, econometric methods, productivity and growth, economic development, and so on, for any topic to have gained market share, as gender, race, and inequality have, is striking.
Jeremy did the research and the overwhelming share of the writing of the paper, and it was generous of him to include me as an author. The above two paragraphs are just about my only contribution to the text. But (a) the idea for the paper was inspired by one of my blog posts and (b) I was involved enough to share the blame for any errors or problems that remain in the paper.
[UPDATE: 3. How to teach differently to minorities is the latest announcement about an AEA workshop. Speaking of the road to sociology. . .]
Thanks Arnold.
As a 20-odd year member of the AEA, I have obviously noticed the slow leftward trend, though I am kind of shocked by the degree here that the field has become so one-sided. Economics gained it’s prestige by being (relatively) far more scientific and far less biased than the other social sciences, but unfortunately our field does seem to be increasingly cashing in reputation capital chips for partisan political and ideological reasons.
Very sad.
Mainstream economics exists primarily to justify and provide cover for whatever policies that the intellectual elite deem necessary at some given point in time. Which is to say that the economist is riding in the backseat, but he keeps deluding himself into believing that he is in the driver’s seat. And, thank god that he is not in the driver’s seat…
One of the most devastating and accessible critiques of economics that I’ve ever listened to. The fun part, Ronsenberg seems seems totally winded by the end, but he nailed it.
https://www.econtalk.org/rosenberg-on-the-nature-of-economics/
No surprise, the graphs look a lot like Zach Goldberg’s charts from his Great Awokening research into media word usage. Great minds thing alike. His focus on analyzing word usage frequency may not have inspired this similar approach, but a citation would have allowed readers to think about possible connections and implications.
Eventually people are going to do this for a lot of other kinds of documents and communications, and the big meta-analysis will be to point out how remarkable are both (1) the speed and magnitude of the trends, and (2) the synchronization across many domains. Maybe they will also try to compare them to past elite intellectual fashions like Freudianism.
If that were done, one thing I’d be curious to see would be a kind of ‘lag analysis’, to see the trickle-down hierarchy and arrows of influence of which institutions tended to lead an be ahead of a fashion cycle, and which tended to lag and follow behind.
So, for example, one might expect information starting with some “ideological entrepreneurs”, then getting picked up and coming out of elite prestigious universities like Harvard, a little later in the media and academic journals, a consensus in the Democratic party, some time later in judicial and other government issuances, then maybe median public opinion, then a consensus in the GOP establishment, then down into churches, and finally into even explicitly anti-progressive ‘right-wing’ groups.
Why has it become so dangerous to believe:
1) Racism exists, but it is not the most important problem facing African-American communities.
2) That most of the societal attempts to help African-Americans have so far ended up hurting them more than helping them.
3) That we should use an evidence-based approach to address (i) poverty, (ii) crime, and (iii) education in African-American communities. (BTW good intentions do not equal evidence.)
These very reasonable views can now get you canceled in every major university in the West.
Say her name!
Breonna Taylor!
[am I spelling it and pronouncing it correctly…no offense intended]
“Why has it become so dangerous …”
Because among the people who wish it weren’t dangerous, there is not yet a critical mass who are willing to do what it would take to make it safe. That’s why.
Since we are at Cassandra Score > 50, by the time they are finally fed up and appreciate the danger enough to be willing, they will no longer be able.
We are like the wildebeest gathering on the bank of the Mara River.
I am sure your “why” is rhetorical and that you know very well why the left would consider any of these ideas heretical, even though I believe that they are all largely the truth. I do also believe, however, that those of us who aren’t of the political left are also at fault here. Moderates and libertarians really have no voice, so perhaps they can be excused. However, conservatives just aren’t interested in these issues, which I think is a shame. As you just eloquently and succinctly noted, the conservatives could fairly easily have a response that would have science and reason on their side, but they just don’t bother. Thinking long term, the conservatives might never win over the majority of African American voters but just showing empathy and concern for the issues of the community would be a start.
“Moderates and libertarians really have no voice, so perhaps they can be excused.”
Yeah, they are basically a bunch of losers that like to accuse everyone else of throwing them under the bus.
In actuality, nobody really cares about them, since they serve no useful purpose. They should just stick to preaching amongst themselves about open borders, drug legalization, police reform and blah, blah, blah. None of this stuff will move the needle.
“but just showing empathy and concern for the issues of the community would be a start.”
When haven’t they?
If by “concern” you mean “accept a bunch of priors, attitudes, and policies” they disagree with, then of course they are never going to show “concern”.
This Supreme Court nominee adopted two black orphans from Haiti and raised them herself and the response from progressives is that she is a colonizer. You don’t get much more concerned than that.
Partly everyone has assumptions about what the cultural and political conditions of a majority non-white population will be so they are trying to position themselves for that reality. In those circumstances it may well be that all three of those positions are socially untenable.
Also, the committed win. Bolsheviks were a minority, but they wanted it more. Reasonable people are by definition not zealots willing to lay it all on the line.
Pretty much all sides were willing to fight, kill, and risk their lives. Yes, the Bolsheviks were ahead of the curve in being earlier and more willing to embrace outright terror as a political strategy, but that was not their main source and strategic reserve of strength.
What happened in most European countries in the early 20th century was the eventual culmination around WWI of the 1848 revolutions and the “spring of nations” (perhaps one could even say the reaping of the whirlwinds sewn by the winds of the French Revolution), which was the the thirty year long suicide of traditional European civilization, “The world of yesterday”.
In replacing their monarchies and anciens regimes (and all but abandoning Christianity) with newborn secular republican systems in the midst of incredible social upheaval and instability, many governments found themselves run by politically weak and unsteady coalitions with a ‘liberal’ (mostly socialist-lite) center, surrounded on both flanks by hard-core Red Fist Communists (definitely totalitarian) to their left, and militant Nationalists to their right (sometimes totalitarian, to the extent that the old basis of “throne and alter” were locally respected or rejected). One saw the same pattern in Spain, Italy, Germany, Russia, and other countries too.
In all of these cases, the liberal center could not hold. And the ‘liberals’ knew it, it wasn’t quite, “he best lack all conviction”, but few had confidence they could hold on to power and govern well, given the turbulent situation. It was clear that one of the flanks would win, and the question in any particular country was only “which flank”?
The answer was mostly who had the strategic reserve of support and sympathy of certain elites in the military, of the liberals in nominal power, and of members of the old guard maintaining their positions. This determined who got the book thrown at them, and who got off with a slap on the wrist.
Wherever the Communists won, it was the same story, which was the liberals were operating under the “no enemies to the left” principle, that they could not articulate key ideological lines or differences between themselves and their more principled and doctrinally pure radical rivals sharing the same general outlook, looked at them in the manner of brothers with good intentions but who had gone astray or gotten carried away in the moment and who only needed mild correction.
In contrast, they regarded the Nationalists as the True Enemy and one which must be crushed absolutely and defeated at all costs, with any allies available. On this matter they were as bloodthirsty and spirited as anybody. They were out to kill the wolf, but forgot that their fellow leftists were also wolves.
The liberals regarded those more ‘passionate’ allies as ‘their’ foot-soldiers for the cause, thus worthy of a special allowances, but those foot-soldier allies were not going to be taking orders from these people. The ‘liberals’ like Kerensky would quite quickly find themselves wiped out or sent into exile by those same ‘allies’.
Lenin spent years openly mocking precisely this kind of suicidal liberal foolishness in his voluminous writings, but it didn’t matter, the liberals did it anyway. They even naively imagined the Bolsheviks would abide by the results of the election they lost, only to discover that the Bolsheviks had no intention whatsoever of letting a mere election stand in their way.
So, it’s not just a matter of a committed minority “versus” a passive majority. It’s a committed minority that gets to enjoy the *acquiescence and sympathy* of enough elites that they can roll over the opposition first, and then those sympathizers next.
If we’re to believe Anna Greifman and Gary Saul Morson, the broader public was much more sympathetic to the Bolsheviks and the like than their nominal affiliations suggest. More moderate parties would cheer-lead the extremists right up to the moment they took over. I know little about Russian history, so I can’t attest to this story’s validity, but per their story it seems more like it was a crowd full of people who wanted a riot, and the Bolsheviks were just the ones brave enough to through a brick through a window and get it started. Maybe violent revolutions aren’t as much minority affairs as we optimistically tend to think.
And so, the night being over,
I returned to my companions where they were.
When I got there I was amazed to see
How many others, women and men, had come,
Wretched survivors of the fall of the city,
To join us in the exile and the journey,
A heartbreaking company, come from everywhere,
Ready in their hearts and with their fortunes,
To follow me wherever I was going.
And now the morning star was rising over
The highest ridges of Ida, bringing in
The day that was beginning; the Danaans held
The city behind the gates that they had locked.
There was no hope of further help. And so
I acknowledged this, and taking up the burden
Of my father once again, I sought the hills.
-Virgil
The intellectually monochromatic, globalist profession also regards “free trade” as divine, in a world where there is no such thing as “free,” “fair,” or “foul” trade.
Langbert’s piece reflects ideological cocooning that has been going on for a long time. The two follow on links reflect the consequences of that increasingly closed world. But the consequences can also be seen in other phenomena.
Turning again to Jeffrey Friedman’s Power Without Knowledge:
“Seventy-eight percent of the empirical studies that appeared in the 13 years after the publication of Card and Krueger’s paper affirmed the orthodox view that minimum wages cause unemployment. Yet opposition to raising the minimum wage dropped from 90 percent among surveyed economists in 1978 to 46 percent in 2000, and by 2005—five years after Card and Krueger acknowledged, in the pages of the American Economic Review, that they could no longer sustain their original claims—some 52 percent of surveyed economists favored raising the US minimum wage or keeping it the same. Indeed, a number of economists took to declaring adamantly, on empirical grounds, that “the record is clear”—minimum wages do not cause unemployment—mimicking the certitude of economists such as Buchanan, who had previously reached the opposite conclusion on theoretical grounds.
In a book published three years before the original Card and Krueger paper appeared, David Colander may have laid the groundwork for understanding economists’ apparent overreaction to it. According to Colander, liberal economists such as himself, who constituted a clear majority in the discipline, had, in general, been “extremely hesitant to apply economic analysis to real-world situations because it often comes to results that don’t fit their moral view of how things should be.” If Colander was right, then when the Card and Krueger study opened the door to doubts about the minimum-wage orthodoxy, liberal political predispositions may have pushed those doubts farther than the evidence would appear to have justified. In other words, ideological doctrine may have displaced the old theoretical doctrine.”