Why I see academic economics moving left

Don Boudreaux wonders why I make that prediction, and he offers one possible explanation.

economists’ increasing embrace of empiricism that isn’t solidly rooted in basic microeconomic theory of the sort that can be, and should be, taught to undergraduates. That which can be measured and quantified is that which can be seen. Indeed, to quantify something is, in a real sense, to see something – or at least to see some of that something’s physical manifestations. And yet a chief lesson taught by a sound course in basic economics is that many social phenomena are unseen.

What I need is an explanation for what I see as the current and future drift of economics. The difference between the seen and the unseen has been discussed since Bastiat. It could be true that the greater availability of data and the greater emphasis on empirical work creates a bias toward seeing the benefits of intervention and understating the costs. But that is not one of the explanations I had in mind.

I am thinking primarily in terms of the culture of the academy. Disciplines can easily become dominated by narrow ways of thinking. As of the late 1970s, when I was in graduate school, mathematical optimization and multiple regression crowded out everything else. Soon, rational expectations theory and dynamic stochastic optimization had crowded out any sensible thinking about macroeconomics. As those of you who have read my macro memoir can perhaps appreciate, my experience leads me to believe that incredibly dumb ideas can become dominant in an environment in which a handful of professors effectively control the academic job market in a field.

I actually think that in terms of methods, academic economics is getting more broad-minded and less stupid. The generation that believed that progress comes from solving more difficult math problems and using fancier econometrics is finally giving way to younger economists with less rigid methodological doctrines. But young economists are less interested in the fundamental issues of social organization. They prefer looking at narrower, technical questions. They are happy to write papers that suggest potential policy improvements, without worrying about how the political process conducts itself in practice.

If contemporary America is embroiled in a war between the Concrete class that works with stuff and the Abstract class that works with words, numbers, and computer programs, then economists, like other Academics, will side with the Abstract class. The Abstract class believes that in the natural order of things it ought to be managing and governing. I suspect that young economists today are not going to want to criticize this natural order of things, for fear of being shunned as class traitors.

15 thoughts on “Why I see academic economics moving left

  1. Consider my NPR critique: they focus on national news peppered with human interest usually involving oppressed classes. Likewise economics may be squeezed between national economics that naturally skews central government and sociology that emphasizes oppression and status.

    • Then there is a psychology analogy where they spend very little effort on non-abnormal (normal) psychology.

  2. My explanation would be the same as my explanation for why academics in general are on the left: the left wants experts to make decisions for the rest of us, and academics are considered experts. Therefore, as an academic, leaning left is the same as promoting your own status and influence.

  3. And not just time? There is no logic behind conservatism. There is only the desire to stop time or revert to an earlier imagined one. Today’s conservatives are yesterday’s liberals. Change happens, culture moves on, and some are left fighting the last war until the bitter end.

    • Explain that to Erdogan or the Copts in Egypt. The future belongs to the people who have children. You’re extrapolating too much from a narrow slice of history from a relatively small corner of the earth.

    • Lord;
      Of course there’s a logic behind conservatism!
      That logic is that
      (1) Humanity faces many hard problems.
      (2) We’re not the first smart people ever to stride the earth. Many before us have faced those problems, and some have found [at least “good enough”] solutions.
      …..(2a) Many of the better solutions have been endorsed by thousands — nay, millions — of others, who were smart enough to latch onto a better idea when they saw one.
      (3) We’d have to be suicidally stupid to throw out all that past learning simply because it originated in the past.
      If you were left alone & naked in some trackless wilderness, you’d be dead of exposure or starvation in a matter of weeks. Re-inventing the wheel is foolishness.

      • There is a want to re-invent the wheel, in their own image, to their own benefit. The ‘their’ is those who clamor for govt intervention, appeal to higher authority of govt, and/or wish to acquire scarce products and services without having to do so through the pricing mechanism.

  4. Leftism pays at University of California, courtesy of taxpayer. The legislature pays for university leftism.

  5. Well, there is Robert Conquest’s second law of politics: “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Conquest#Robert_Conquest.E2.80.99s_Three_Laws_of_Politics].

    It’s not clear *why* Conquest’s observation seems to hold so often. Perhaps, organizations just tend towards collectivist ideals because organizations, as entities, are collectives. Another explanation is that humans are eventually drawn to the oppressor-oppressed axis because the hero-villain narrative is classic and humans find stories attractive, more attractive than rational logic.

    That doesn’t explain, though, why individuals don’t always become left-wing. Conquest’s first law is, “Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.” I’m not sure about that one but, if true, because everyone knows one thing best, then everyone must be conservative about at least one thing, thus preventing him from becoming left-wing about everything. Maybe, economics is becoming left-wing because it is becoming more specialized (?). Individuals may be conservative about their non-overlapping areas of expertise but, because those areas are non-overlapping, there is no topic around which the whole profession stays conservative. Thus, the profession taken as a whole drifts leftward. That would be the implication if one accepts Conquest’s first two laws as both true.

  6. Good topic. Reading the post and comments reminded me of this by James Thompson:

    http://www.unz.com/jthompson/lefties-and-media/

    It could be that much of academia is becoming more like a “media” environment so that it is congenial to leftists concerned about fairness and oppression–the “oppressor-oppressed axis” in the three axis model. Which sounds like much of sociology.

    = – = – =

    Nice to see BC bring up Robert Conquest’s Three Laws.

    Somewhere (either _Dragons of Expectation_ or _Reflections on a Ravaged Century_), Conquest asserted that many intellectuals are not in fact people who thing long and hard and carefully about things, endlessly doing their analysis and checking it twice, tightening and looking for possible errors. He suggests that many intellectuals are rather people who are “excited by ideas.” I’m not immune to the syndrome, so please don’t think I’m merely being sanctimonious.

    Methinks this was said by Conquest–it might have been Thomas Sowell.

    If we have a lot of people who are “excited by ideas,” and many of those ideas push us left rather than right (conservatives believe in the old which tended to work ok–liberals believe in the new which sounds pretty good, what could go wrong). Meanwhile there is an “overproduction” of educated elites relative to what the economy can absorb, some of them may end up in economics and push it further left toward Sociology.

    I wonder what subgroups are more conservative. I am a geographer–spatial statisticians are on average more conservative, I suspect, than cultural geographers.

    surgeons are more conservative than pediatricians, I have heard it said.

    business economists in the private sector are more conservative than public health economists in academia, I would suspect.

    It would be nice to see what are the most and least liberal of the economics sub-specialties

  7. Inasmuch as this leftward shift is occurring, it may not require much of an explanation for the discipline itself. Once I bias is introduced into an institution it tends to regenerate and expand itself through hiring preferences and self-selection; ‘neutrality’, if there is such a thing, is an unstable equilibrium. Since universities in general skew left, and economists are subject to general institutional preferences in hiring and tenure, not just to their fellow economists, and because of the general left wing atmosphere of universities (I can see it being irksome just to be a non-leftist on a major university, regardless of one’s department), there may be a push leftward in academia regardless or even despite what goes on within the discipline. And the more the discipline tilts left, the more of a positive feedback loop it becomes, exacerbating the phenomenon.

  8. Hayek’s noted decades ago a correlation between intelligence and socialism. In “Fatal Conceit” he said intelligence is overrated, especially by intelligent people. Intelligence leads them to believe they can control anything. Intelligent people often lack humility, the main requirement for wisdom.

    Schoeck wrote that the power of socialism is envy in “Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior.”

  9. Economics drifts left because it’s “practitioners” are in a leftist environment, generally, and don’t want to be socially ostracized. In addition, they believe that leftist ideology will serve them well in getting hired and paid attention to by policy makers and politicians. Economists after Keynes are entranced by guiding large governments to centrally control economic acitivy, much to the detriment of all. Economics now, as it was when established as an academic (though hardly scientific or rigorous–its is scientism, pure and simple) discipline, is a scam on the public, perpetrated by the Self-Anointed to attempt to impose their “Vision of the Anointed” on us hoi poloi, who, in Bigoted Galtonian fashion, are viewed by economists as sheep to be shepherded on a “well tended moor.”
    Economists have no idea what they are doing. Their micro and macroeconomic ideas have suffered in the implementation to the point that they have botched everything they have done for over a hundred years: The Great Depression? Economists contributed heavily to making it deeper and longer; Stagflation? Volker broke the back of that but we have had recession after recession, the Savings and Loan collapse, the dot-com bust, the 9.11 economic meltdown, and the 2008 financial collapse. And now we have QE to the umpteenth power that has most driven deficit spending and massive accumulation of public debt and an economy so fragile that the Fed fears to raise interest rates anticipating another financial armageddon as the government tries to finance massive debt, levitating the stock market like cheap magicians. Deflation is feared like the bubonic plague, on no evidence and we are in an inescapable bind of debt that mandates low interest rates to carry. The original Economists, to an individual, were Eugenicists who longed for a human population, bred by them and their cohorts, to match their Utopian dreams. Never have so few caused so much damage and misery, in the throes of the greatest economic advancements (accomplished in spite of their efforts–economicst have by and large impeded economic growth and development) in human history. And like the crowing cock, they think they make the sun rise.

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