About a year ago, Aaron Clauset, Samuel Arbesman, and Daniel B. Larremore wrote

A strong core-periphery pattern has profound implications for the free exchange of ideas. Research interests, collaboration networks, and academic norms are often cemented during doctoral training. Thus, the centralized and highly connected positions of higher-prestige institutions enable substantial influence, via doctoral placement, over the research agendas, research communities, and departmental norms throughout a discipline . The close proximity of the core to the entire network implies that ideas originating in the high-prestige core, regardless of their merit, spread more easily throughout the discipline, whereas ideas originating from low-prestige institutions must filter through many more intermediaries. Reinforcing the association of centrality and insularity with higher prestige, we observe that 68 to 88% of faculty at the top 15% of units received their doctorate from within this group, and only 4 to 7% received their doctorate from below the top 25% of units.

The top graduate schools in any field form a tight club, into which it is nearly impossible to break in. This allows disciplines to easily be captured by fads, because the voices that would reveal the emperor’s nakedness are so completely marginalized.

In economics, I have argued that this phenomenon produced the spread of really silly approaches to macroeconomics, which is still a problem in the profession. This topic will be explored more in what I am calling The Book of Arnold.

Bueller? Peter J. Boettke and Rosolino A. Candela write,

Chicago price theory in the Friedman/Stigler/Becker generation was not defined by the comparative analysis of the institutional conditions within which the constant adjustments and adaptations by economic actors to changing conditions produces a tendency towards equilibrium, as it had been under the Knight/Simons/Viner generation. Instead, price theory in the hands of Friedman/Stigler/Becker became an exercise in defining the optimality conditions given any situation within which human actors find themselves.

From the conclusion:

The Chicago “Tight Prior Equilibrium” imposes a logical discipline on the world of human affairs, but it does not invite an inquiry into the diversity of institutions that arise to ameliorate our human imperfections and potentially turn situations of conflict into opportunities for social cooperation. As a result, the “fresh water” economics of Chicago still leaves us thirsty, and the “saltwater” economics of MIT/Harvard cannot serve to quench our thirst, so we must look to those alternative streams of thought for satisfaction in our quest to understand the dynamics of the market process.

In short, as I once put it,

Chicago economics: Markets work, so use markets

Harvard-MIT economics: Markets fail, so use government

Masonomist: Markets fail, so use markets

For Masonomist, the authors substitute the ABC’s. They write,

Outside of the University of Chicago, a “neglected” branch of Chicago price theory emerged among economists Armen Alchian, James Buchanan, and Ronald Coase, who provided an understanding of the market economy not by assuming the conditions [of] equilibrium, but by focusing their analysis on the dynamic adjustments required in the presence of market failures. By drawing attention to institutional solutions and the role of entrepreneurial action in discovering such solutions, they illustrated how market processes ameliorate social conflict and open up the possibility of realizing the gains from productive specialization and peaceful cooperation through voluntary exchange. It is this argument we contend that fulfills Simons’ plea for academic economics, and proves to be a better prophylactic against popular fallacies.

Robin Hanson writes,

in our intellectual world, usually there just is no “debate”; there are just different sides who separately market their points of view. Just as in ordinary marketing, where firms usually pitch their products without mentioning competing products, intellectuals marketing of points of view also usually ignore competing points of view. Instead of pointing out contrary arguments and rebutting them, intellectual usually prefer to ignore contrary arguments.

Or cherry-pick the weakest contrary argument. Or make up straw-man positions for the other side.

The WaPo reports,

The new argument, which Piketty spelled out recently in the French newspaper Le Monde, is this: Inequality is a major driver of Middle Eastern terrorism, including the Islamic State attacks on Paris earlier this month — and Western nations have themselves largely to blame for that inequality.

To say that his views have not been well received might be an understatement. An essay in Quartz says,

But empirical studies suggest that poverty and inequality aren’t behind terror attacks. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Alan Krueger, the Princeton economist and future Obama administration official, examined databases of terror attacks to identify trends among the participants. Surprisingly, he found most were well-educated and not poor.

Even if terrorists are not poor, inequality still might cause terrorism. A terrorist could be a rich person who is jealous of people who are even richer.

Still, Piketty is not my type of thinker. As translated by Google, Piketty’s essay begins

It is obvious that terrorism feeds on the Middle Eastern powder keg of inequality

When I make highly speculative statements, I start out by saying “my guess is that,” not “it is obvious that.” Piketty’s approach may work better with some personality types.

When pressed, he seems to back off of strong claims and concede points to others. But I think that economists should be trained not to make such claims in the first place.