Economics and Ideology
Dan Drezner disagrees with Chris Hayes about whether Econ 101 is a form of right wing indoctrination, saying that his own first micro class waxed rhapsodic about the joys of technocratic intervention, and that he didn’t discover the public choice critique of government until grad school. Now public choice is an unabashedly ideological approach to the world, at least if the co-editor of the flagship journal in the field, Charles Rowley, is to be believed. In his introduction to the Edward Elgar public choice reader, he describes public choice as a “program of scientific endeavor that exposed government failure coupled to a programme of moral philosophy that supported constitutional reform designed to limit government,” and suggests that its opponents are “scholars who had rendered themselves dependent on the subsidies of big government and whose lucrative careers in many instances were linked to advising … agents of the compound republic.”
There is a strong strain in economics more generally that is unabashedly ideological too. Take this effort to figure out a sort of Nicene creed that would allow ‘real economists’ to profess their faith and thus distinguish themselves from bluffers like Kenneth Arrow and Robert Solow. “Real” economists apparently believe that demand curves always slope downwards, even when empirical evidence tells you that they don’t (I’ve always preferred the Apostles’ Creed myself). Now this doesn’t say, contra both some economists and some of their sillier critics, that a commitment to the kinds of models that economists use necessarily makes you predisposed to be right wing (Jack Knight and Jim Johnson, two rational choice lefties, have an interesting forthcoming piece discussing how rhetorical slippage between general equilibrium and partial equilibrium models provides a bogus ideological justification for many pro-market arguments). But it does mean that many people who take economics courses, as they are typically taught in this country, end up coming out of these courses more right wing than they were going in, and perhaps more right wing than the actual theory itself would support, if it were looked at carefully. I think (although I can’t find it using Google, so I may be wrong), that there’s actually empirical evidence supporting the first of these claims – a survey someone did a few years back measuring the political opinions that people had entering graduate programs in economics, and their political opinions after a few semesters of coursework, which found that there was a pronounced and statistically significant shift to the right (if anyone knows where this survey is to be found, feel free to point to it in comments).
Update: I’ve found the survey via Google Scholar, although it isn’t a longitudinal study as I thought it was; the findings are reported in The Making of an Economist Redux in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.
The large majority of [students surveyed in seven top ranked econ grad programs] (80 percent) felt that their political views did not change in graduate schools, although that changed by year, with 10 percent of first-year students reporting a change in their views, but 32 percent of fourth- and higher-year students reporting a change in their views. In particular, 10 percent of first-year students considered themselves conservative; by the fourth and fifth year, this number had risen to 23 percent. There was also a large drop by year in students who considered themselves radical; that percentage fell from 13 percent of first year students to only 1 percent of fourth-year and higher students.
It’s been my multi-anecdotal experience that even one econ class can move a relatively apolitical person significantly to the right.
I’ve been trying to get a grip on economics for some time. My conclusion so far is that economists, like lawyers, are highly knowledgable advocates rather than scientists the way physicists are. There’s really an enormous body of agreed-upon, uncontroversial physics, but seemingly not of economics.
And where physics often gives you exact, reliable answers, whenever I overhear economists debating it’s always (as Truman complained) “on the one hand…., but on the other hand…..”
I think that the presentation of economics as a science like physics is something of a fraud, and that the math sometimes serves as a screen to hide the ideology (and professional vested interest) behind.
To me disentangling the empirical content and usable understanding from the other shit would be a noble enterprise. (I’m aware that Quine has proved that to be impossible).
Seemingly, too, there’s quite a gap between the top economists in the top schools and the generic, median, modal economists at the generic, median, modal schools (and below).
It’s been amusing to se the hard right become anti-economists in order to defend Bush.
My Econ 101 prof was very smart and very libertarian. It was the first time I’d been confronted with the very powerful arguments that free marketeers bring to the table, and it definitely shifted my fiscal politics to the right (e.g., by making me less reflexively pro-regulation).
An amusing aside. On the exams, whenever I didn’t know the answer, I would choose the answer I thought best expressed what the professor would want me to believe. Now, I didn’t always get these answers correct, but, well, let’s just say I did better than chance.
“…many people who take economics courses, as they are typically taught in this country, end up coming out of these courses more right wing than they were going in…”
Couldn’t this just be plain old fashioned self-interest, rather than right-wing indoctrination? The people who are churned out at the end of these courses are in a very different economic position than they were when they entered them. Couldn’t it just be an effect of, you know, class?
I do think that economic education on average moves students to the right (in terms of economic issues) but I think the effect operates differently then is supposed above. It’s not free market indoctrination.
Economists emphasize trade offs, look at costs and benefits of various policies, emphasize the real world constraints faced by policy makers (sometimes with a bit too much glee). All this leads, as John points out, to a lot of “on the one hand, on the other hand”. But this isn’t indoctrination, it’s a move towards moderation. I understand the arguments for a minimum wage hike (God forgive me for using this as an example). I understand the arguments against them. Whether or not it’s worth it in the end (according to my own criteria) depends on things like elasticities of labor supply and demand – and empirical estimates of these suggest that currently a modest increase in the minimum wage wouldn’t have much of an effect either way but a large one would have a significant negative effect. So I wind up in the slightly center-right position of opposing things like “living wages” which would raise wages to prohibitive levels but being fairly sanguine about modest minimum wage increases.
So how does that square with admitting that economic education DOES move students to the right. If I’m right then a staunchly anti-min wage student would become less so and a staunchly pro-min wage student less so as well. Shouldn’t it wash out?
Not if most students coming up into the econ class are leaning left to begin with, which I do think is the case (not necessarily because of academia being a left wing place, which it is, but also because of factors such as their age). So overall effect is to shift them right.
Oh yeah and as far as getting good grades by guessing the Prof’s preferred ideology and answering accordingly – this is a problem with a bad Prof not with a bad subject. I’ve taken many classes in Sociology, Anthro, and even History where it was possible to show up only on test dates and ace the suckers by answering every question by going as far left as you could stomach.
The most obvious effect here is that of expanding knowledge. The average liberal student may come into college with a head stuffed full of empty cliches and slogans, but from taking a basic economics course, that student could start to realize that traditional liberal programs (welfare, rent control, etc., etc.) are complicated by the elementary fact that people respond to incentives. Or she could realize that “regulation” isn’t always a matter of good and enlightened government vs. evil corporations (as many liberals seem to think even after a college education). Instead, the question is complicated by regulatory capture, cost-benefit analysis, the fact that big businesses often use regulation to stifle smaller competitors, etc.
Just to be fair, I’ll admit that the average conservative 18-year-old from a rich suburb could well become more liberal after taking a sociology course where he is exposed to the way that poor people really lived, or a history course that really explores the history of race relations in this country.
Either way, what’s going on is a simple-minded 18-year-old suddenly learning that there’s more to the world than adolescent cliches.
Henry:
This was definitely the case with me when I took Micro 101 during my engineering undergrad. At the time, I also observed a similar phenomenon among my classmates. (I should add that this happened several years ago in a post-socialist Eastern European country, where people’s beliefs about economics are generally much more leftist than in Western Europe, let alone North America.)
However, I vehemently disagree with the conclusion that this constitutes evidence of indoctrination. You seem to a priori refuse to consider the possibility that people ignorant of economics might indeed often harbor leftist beliefs based on clearly false folkish economic theories, which might be rectified by taking an elementary economics course. My shift in the pro-market direction caused by attending Micro 101 mostly consisted of reversing such beliefs.
The commenter above writes that there’s no such thing as a body of uncontroversial economics, and a similar assumption seems to underly your post too. But there are clear counterexamples to such claims. For example, I am not an economicst, but my understanding is that the link between price controls and shortages is an entirely uncontroversial corollary of simple microeconomics. However, before I took Micro 101, I had believed that it was entirely right that the government should employ severe price controls of essential goods and I saw no bad consequences whatsoever in such policies. It had never occurred to me that price controls directly cause shortages and long lines. When I saw actual shortages and lines caused by such policies, I would blame them—just like most of my countrymen—on some entirely vague notion of general corruption and incompetence of the government.
One could find many such examples where people’s folkish leftist beliefs can be refuted by entirely positive and universally accepted economic theories. If this constitutes indoctrination, then what doesn’t?
Also the “Cafe Hayek dudes” being Austrians (or along those line) and all would be considered out of the mainstream. Definetly not as mainstream as the almost-socialist Arrow or the fairly liberal Solow. So in “there is a strong strain in economics generally” while the word “strain” belongs there, the words “strong” and “generally” do not.
Either way, what’s going on is a simple-minded 18-year-old suddenly learning that there’s more to the world than adolescent cliches.
Replacing adolescent cliches with Econ 101 cliches is not progress, especially if the Econ 101 cliches are false. Minimum wage is one of the issues on which erroneous Econ 101 thinking seems most common. Contrary to what has been said above, I don’t think that most intro econ courses give a balanced picture of the minimum wage question.
Starting with Drezner and continuing here, the defenders of the econ profession seem to be taking the tack that the fine econ courses they took were much better than the crappy, tacky econ courses taken by less wonderful people. Sort of like the Republicans who would never listen to Rush Limbaugh and therefore feel that he has nothing to do with them, even though he’s functionally one of the most important Republicans of all.
At least as relevant is:
Does Studying Economics Inhibit Cooperation?
Robert H. Frank, Thomas Gilovich, Dennis T. Regan
Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Spring, 1993), pp. 159-171
In addition to changing views on positive political issues, as discussed above, many Econ 101 courses cultivate a cynical attitude that appeals to a strong strain in 18-year-old thinking. The same is true, in a different way, of exposure to some brands of Marxism.
I never was taught basic economics (Latin and Greek were thought to be much more useful), but the logic of a rightward shift seems pretty straightforward to me.
First, you are taught how to conjugate a verb. That would be Latin 101.
Metella est mater. Quintis est filius et ambulat in hortum. Hic, haec, hoc. (This is all I can remember)
Then you spend the next 5 years learning all the 20,000 exceptions to the rule. That would be real Latin.
Similarly, Econ 101 is for libertarians, while economy is for, huh, real economists. The libertarians never get past the Esperanto-like first grade version of Latin.
They only learn the first bit: how markets work. They never get round to the second, far more frustrating bit: markets don’t work all the time, and can indeed fail disastrously. The invisible hand often needs guidance.
I don’t think this (warning: PDF) is what you were thinking of, but it could be.
This (jstor link from non-access site; YMMV, citation below), though, is likely it. (Rothman and Scott, “Political Opinions and the TUCE,” Journal of Economic Education, 1973)
Too much of economics teaching is reminiscent of calculus as practiced by Wernher von Braun (in the words of Tom Lehrer): “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department,” says Wernher von Braun.
Say, rather, that neoclassical economics is a very useful set of disciplinary tools for somebody whose instincts and intuitions are on the left. They sharpen your arguments and clarify your thought. By contrast, I think that most people whose instincts and intuitions are on the right find their arguments dulled and muddied by too much exposure to neoclassical economics…
I would suggest it’s important to, err, look at a more complicated model than the single-influence effect theorized here. One thing commentators may be missing is the potential influence of the huge punditry machine dedicated to establishing that economics “proves” Republican and right-wing politics are Scientifically Correct, and all Democrats and/or Liberals are Against Science. Physics doesn’t have this sort of abuse. Evolution does, in the sense of the much-discussed “evolutionary psychology”.
So, while it’s entirely possible the economics 101 is not in any way intrinisically right-wing, combining it with the punditry machine as a co-factor could very well lead to more wingerness as people learn a little bit of economics. It’s not that they now understand that conservative Republicans are right and liberal Democracts are wrong (which would be the propagandist’s prefered explanation). But that they’re now primed in a certain way where there’s a large differential in political marketing (especially to people disconnected from certain realities).
My favorite example of this is Libertarian’s fable that a free market won’t support sex/race discrimination. They have a toy model – the market corrects for unused talent, sex/race creates imbalance, therefore discriminated sex/race must actually be inferior. No matter how many times it’s pointed out them that mathematically, it fails the moment one considers alliances or differential effects, they repeat the toy model – because it’s confirming what they want to believe.
So this is not taking place isolated from very politically interested action in general.
Perhaps academic economists are more liberal than the average econ PhD, since econ PhDs can make more money elsewhere, and economic conservatives follow the money.
My perception of the econ profession is that it ranges from very conservative to neoliberal, with neoliberals in the minority. People always assure me that my perception is wrong, and that economists are really nice decent people. But the university is a sheltered and artificial environment.
This still wouldn’t account for why econ 101 is so bad, however. Maybe it’s a split-the-difference compromise.
P.S. Ivan: Econ classes in the ex-USSR and its satellites may have moved Komsomol kids to the right, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.
Now where exactly do I do this? I suggest two things above. (1) That grad students who study economics have a tendency to move to the right. (2) That economics as it’s taught today frequently does have a pronounced ideological bias. What I don’t do at all is to say, or hint, that the first is completely a product of the second. Indeed, I’m quite careful to distinguish them noting that I think that there’s “actually empirical evidence supporting the first of these claims” (emphasis added). I believe, but can’t prove, that the ideological content of economics education (as opposed to the clarification of folk-beliefs)does account for some of the observed rightward shift. But I don’t know of any good way of figuring out how much it actually accounts for.
So I’m not at all claiming that economics is a valueless exercise in ideological indoctrination. Not at all – I’m a happy possessor of a B.A. degree in the subject meself. What I am saying is that there is a clear ideological spin to the way that economics is often taught and (to expand my claim a bit) expounded in public debate, which doesn’t at all necessarily flow from its technical apparatus, but which very plausibly has consequences for the political beliefs of students (and of those members of the general public who follow these debates).
I wonder if it’s also the case that other academic fields create similar shifts in other directions. For instance, does biology tend to make its students more atheistic? Does sociology tend to make its students more socialist? Does literature tend to make people its students more post-modern?
It seems to me that all of the academic fields – in virtue of their unique perspectives – have a quasi-indoctrination effect. Perhaps Henry didn’t mean to single out economics, although that’s all he mentioned.
It seems to me from my undergraduate experience [at a top 20 private university] that the largest ideological shifts happened in the humanities, like sociology, women’s studies, and literature.
On the other hand, the most boring people I met were the economics students, who were distracted with weighing data and doing regression analysis. Economics graduate students are some of the most boring people in the world. Have you ever met any of them? Just be honest with yourselves. Take the honest, partly true stereotypes. Which fields do you think make people more ideological? Economics? Or sociology? Women’s studies? Race studies? Critical Legal Theory? Etc.?
I think all honest persons can admit that, for good or for ill, the non-economics parts of the non-natural sciences are the worst. I think we can also admit that environmental sciences and biological sciences have obvious effects as well. For instance: Richard Dawkins and Paul Ehrlich.
I have to say, Henry, perhaps it’s just my own market liberal perspective, but the lack of mention of these other fields seems to darken my perception of the fairness of this dispute. If you know any economists, and then you see people at CT going on and on about economics being ideological were the only biasing field in the academy, you realize that the leftish folk of CT are looking at things pretty myopically.
C’mon! Economists are dull. Their students are dull. Their subject matter is DULL, DULL, DULL. Are these really people who are guilty of deep ideological biases? It seems so psychologically implausible to me, just based on their personalities.
Note: I’d like to distinguish some of the Austrians. Their methodology is distinct enough to make their conclusions sound more ideological. I don’t think the Austrian approach has to be, myself. However, many of the people attracted to it are more ideological because, well, you kind of have to be inspired by it to bother working on it. That’s why you get strong reactions out of good guys like Don Beaudreax. For the Austrian, an upward sloping demand curve sounds an awful lot like the breaking of a law of physics.
“Minimum wage is one of the issues on which erroneous Econ 101 thinking seems most common.”
The reason min wage gets taught in every 101 course is simply because it is a real life example of a price floor with which students are most likely familiar with. And it’s only “erroneous” to the extent that it might forget to mention the magnitudes of the effect, not the direction.
“Contrary to what has been said above, I don’t think that most intro econ courses give a balanced picture of the minimum wage question.”
I don’t know about most. When I was a TA most that covered it did try.
“the presentation of economics as a science like physics is something of a fraud”: well, that’s probably true if you mean experimental physics. Some economics does bear some resemblance to spin-a-yarn physics.
As far as John Q’s post on economic education inhibiting cooperation, it needs to be pointed out that cooperation is not always and everywhere a socially beneficial phenomenon. I mean, yeah, if we all could hold hands and sing about peace, love and understanding that would work. But more often then not cooperation takes the form of some folks cooperating against other folks. When firms cooperate, that’s usually called collusion and generally lowers social welfare. When a group of kids gang up and beat up some other kid, that’s cooperation. Students cheating on their exams are cooperating. There are many instances where one for one and none for all gets society a lot more than the musketeers credo (and in the twenty years after they must’ve taken some econ classes as the latter darker story tells).
A more damaging criticism would be if economic education lessened altruism (and the confusion here often stems from conflating cooperation and altruism) like say if econ students made lower offers in dictator games – although even that, given expectations about others, would not be clear cut evidence.
For what it’s worth, I came out of my Econ 101 class, way back in 1987, more liberal/progressive/socialist/what-have-you than when I went it. But then, really the only thing I enjoyed about the class was Polanyi’s “The Great Transformation,” which think we were supposed to read in order to be challenged by a “contrary” opinion.
Regarding economics in general, I like Michael Kazin’s comment from his recent bio of William Jennings Bryan: “Over the past century, economics has become a highly specialized profession that repels those who question its authority.”
Magnitude is something, right? And there are countervailing effects, no? And it’s quite reasonable to say that that minimum wage laws are a good thing, on the balance, isn’t it?
“The reason min wage gets taught in every 101 course is simply because it’s a real life example….” That’s pure assertion, and highly implausible. Cut the crap.
I’ve heard the misleading Econ 101 story on minimum wage over and over again over the last several decades, always outside econ classes, and that’s not simply because it’s a “conveninet real life example.”
Fair enough Henry but your #2 still has to contend with the fact that folks like Arrow and Solow are mainstream (and Stiglitz and Krugman and Samuelson) but “Cafe Hayek dudes” (I like saying that) are not. I mean unless you think that those “600 economists including 4 Nobel winners” are willfully teaching their students things they don’t believe themselves.
What I am saying is that there is a clear ideological spin to the way that economics is often taught and (to expand my claim a bit) expounded in public debate
As a Ph.D. economist who teaches the subject at the college level, I’d certainly agree that it is very possible to teach the subject, especially in introductory courses that constitute the entirety of most students’ exposure to the subject, in an ideologically biased way, and that among econmists that bias is very often a rightward one. I’ve known a fair number of economists over the years who have clearly seen their duty, as an instructor, as being to indoctrinate students into the wonders of free markets.
Introductory courses lend themselves to this because in an introductory course it is all too easy to gloss over the nuances of the subject. Take that minimum wage issue that so unsettles Russell Roberts (who I once TA’d for in grad school). In an introductory course, it is very easy to “cover” that issue by simply presenting the supply-and-demand analysis of a price floor, and leaving students with the simple, unambiguous conclusion that minimum wages reduce employment. Relatively few micro principles courses are going to go into the nuances of the issue, such as whether employers might possibly have some degree of leverage over wages (what economists call market power), whether there is any sort of dynamic feedback such as an impact on job turnover rates and productivity, and the implications of empirical research (few introductory textbooks go into these issues, either). As a result, many students are left with a distorted perspective on the issue.
Magnitude is something, right? And there are countervailing effects, no? And it’s quite reasonable to say that that minimum wage laws are a good thing, on the balance, isn’t it?
Yes, yes and I wouldn’t call you crazy if you said it. To answer the implicit question of the first two, yes, those things should be taught. And at least in my experience they often are.
That’s pure assertion, and highly implausible. Cut the crap.
Uh, which part? That it is not a convenient real life example of a price floor? That that is not the reason it’s taught? Since we’re speaking of unobservable motives here we both can assert away. But see the Caplan article linked to above;
“The paper first tests and decisively rejects the hypothesis that the differences (between Economists’ views and that of the public) solely reflect economists’ self serving bias. Then it examines whether economists’ political ideology and party loyalties explain the disagreement; if anything, this slightly increases their magnitude.”
always outside econ classes,
Maybe, but we’re talking about economic education here.
A more damaging criticism would be if economic education lessened altruism (and the confusion here often stems from conflating cooperation and altruism) like say if econ students made lower offers in dictator games – although even that, given expectations about others, would not be clear cut evidence.
There’s an interesting fillip on the concept that giving away money in a dictator game indicates altruism.
Imagine you are highly altruistic, in a specific way. Your objective in life is to help the worse-off people, not people at random. You live on the bare minimum yourself, giving away all the rest of your money to charities you have researched and deem highly worthy. And you are invited to participate in a dictator/ultimatium/prisoner’s dilemma/etc game at a university (which is normally where these experiments are run). You know that, given the context, it is highly unlikely that the other participants in the game are the worse-off people in the world. So it makes far more sense to try and make as much money as possible, and then donate it to some people you know are very badly off.
So whatever ultimatium/dictator style games are measuring, it’s some value on cooperation, or niceness, or something like that, not altruism (unless it’s a sort of altruism dedicated towards random people without regard to how badly they need the help). I am pretty sure the vast amount of people who make low offers probably just intend to keep the money themselves. But a pure altruist has as much incentive to make as much money for themselves in these games as possible as a purely selfish person.
The problem with the discussion of how minimum wages are taught is that everyone’s just bringing their own experience to the table and it’s hard to say anything about what happens on average. I learned about monopsony and Card and Krueger from a GM grad who, outside the classroom, was proudly liberterian. Others have had other experiences.
And I concur that most intro textbooks are horrible. Just got back my student evaluations and more than half complained, very understandably, about the textbook (not gonna name names). But for some reason the econ textbook publishing industry is a Hotelling game where everyone moves to the same point on the line with no product differentiation. It’s like having four gas stations at an intersection all selling diluted petrol at inflated prices.
That that is not the reason it’s taught?
Yes, that’s what I mean. When I hear the anti-minimum wage Econ 101 BS out on the street, it’s clearly ideologically motivated. The minimum wage is, in fact, one of the big issues separating Republicans, conservatives, libertarians, and free-market ideologues from Democrats and liberals.
I have trouble believing that econ professors are unaware of this. They live in the same world I do. My guess is that it wouldn’t be at all hard to find a less ideological real life example of a price floor, perhaps in the area of widget-pricing, but that for most economists the minimum wage example is a twofer. (And anyway, economists as a group are not at all reluctant to use artificial examples instead of real-life examples).
I’ve known a fair number of economists over the years who have clearly seen their duty, as an instructor, as being to indoctrinate students into the wonders of free markets.
In my experience that’s pretty much the norm.
(Can’t find the Caplan article here, but it doesn’t look convincing.)
jasper: “Similarly, Econ 101 is for libertarians, while economy is for, huh, real economists. The libertarians never get past the Esperanto-like first grade version of Latin.”
Back in the 1990’s, I read a 400-level micro textbook. Not seriously studied, just casually read. And I was still able to mess with the heads of a bunch of self-professed libertarians, on economics (on USENET, not in real life). It really shocked me – I had assumed that these guys knew their stuff.
>Minimum wage is one of the issues on which erroneous Econ 101 thinking seems most common.
Are you suggesting that the bulk of the (advanced, rather than intro) economics literature says that minimum wage laws have net positive results, or are good policy? This seems implausible to me. David Neumark’s most recent literature review, for example, finds quite the opposite.
Also, the mere fact that students become less radical or more skeptical of regulation and government after economics education does not mean that economics education is ideological. To take an example on the other side, if students adopt views more consistent with the Green Party’s on global warming after studying climate science for a few years, that does not mean climate science is ideological.
Someone who takes economic rationality to be normative will end up being pretty heartless. And I meet people who do.
I personally think that rationality should be a normative concept, and that “economic rationality” should be renamed or junked. Gintis and Sen have even made some progress in bringing economic rationality into the real world, though I think that in doing so they ruined for use as theory-building conceptual fiction.
29: I’m saying that whatever economists say, a strong argument can be made that minimum wage laws are good policy, but that Econ 101 students rarely learn this.
Can’t find the Caplan article here, but it doesn’t look convincing
If you can’t find it, how do you know what it looks like? Apparantly just cause you disagree with the conclusion. Why argue about minimum wages? The arguments in favor of higher minimum wages, whatever these may be, just don’t look convincing.
Because of the way you summarized it, Radek. I really doubt that that kind of study can conclusively show that kind of thing. Lot of social science junk out there.
re: 25
Yeah and it’s worth remembering that any offer in the ultimatum/dictator game can be a Nash equilibrium.
I guess a better test of the effect of economic education on altruism would involve looking at how much econ grads contribute to charity compared to others with similar income, controlling for differences in how contributions are treated by states’ tax systems and other effects.
Man. Look at me giving away free research paper topics. I must…be…being…altruistic…Nooooooooooo
!! What happened to all my economic education???
On the other hand, if data was available and that paper was writable then that 20$ wouldn’t be laying there on the sidewalk.
I should have said “it doesn’t look promising”. But if you have an URL post it.
Henry: “’Real’ economists apparently believe that demand curves always slope downwards . . ”
Try (Nobel laureate and Chicago economist) Gary Becker: A Note on Resturant Pricing and Other Examples of Social Influence on Price (JPE 1991):
http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~wgreene/entertainmentandmedia/Noteoninterdependentdemand.pdf
And Harvey Leibenstein: Bandwagon, Snob and Veblin Effects in the Theory of Consumers’ Demand (QJE 1950).
The old charge was that economists were all pinko interventists, early notable examples being Maynard Keynes, Abba Lerner and (Noble laureate) James Meade.
Meade’s Planning and the Price Mechanism (1948), The Theory of Economic Externalities (1973), The Intelligent Radical’s Guide to Economic Policy (1975) and Principles of Political Economy: The Just Economy (1976), are classics of their kind.
That hand isn’t only invisible, it’s also myopic and not very bright.
Every year hordes of freshmen leave econ 101 with a muddle headed view of how the oversimplified mathematical fictions of models they’ve been show relate to the real world.
It so happens that it is exactly the same sort of muddled thinking that has taken deep roots in certain conservative camps. One thing about freshmen, they’ll believe pretty much any old slop if you state it authoritatively. You risk leaving them with the false impression that they have seen `scientific’ support of all sorts of policy shenanigans. It’s hard to claim that this doesn’t result in a bias—- in any such situation you are pedagogically honour-bound to point out carefully all the flaws in your presented material. I haven’t seen any evidence that this is the norm for econ 101 though.
http://wip.blackwellpublishing.com/specialarticles/ecoj716.pdf
Sorry, I included it originally but then my connection broke. And description is from the abstract. Table I does a good job of showing whether or not economists are more “right wing” then the public too.
The arguments in favor of higher minimum wages, whatever these may be, just don’t look convincing.
In canton Geneva where I live the minimum wage is, I think, 22 francs/hour now, that’s about US$17/hour. Meticulously observed. Yet somehow life goes on, people work, drive around, walk the streets, some even smiling. Go figure.
Ah, yes – you have to bag your groceries yourself. Bummer.
Can anyone recommend a few books (including one—I know there’s one out there but I can’t remember it—on sources of economic information) for a non-economist who wants to get beyond Econ. 101?
Why can’t we just lump mainstream economics, analytic philosophy and literary theory together and say that academic exercises based on falsely analogical pretensions to hard science and self-regarding rationalism will result inevitably in undynamic [brittle, inflexible] models that do a lousy job of describing the world of experience.
hmm?
The parsimonious explanation is that microeconomics is basically correct, yet quite nonobvious to the average person. Thus it is right wing “indoctrination”, in a sense, because it suggests different ideas than what most people are born with or pick up from society.
Basically I’m just dittoing #4.
The situation of people whose education does not include microeconomics, trying to function in everyday life, is akin to that of naturalists who lived before Darwin. Theory is a powerful tool for guiding observation.
As for the minimum wage, well, what other state-enforced price floor does the average student have any experience of? It’s a perfect example of a real-life policy with real effects, so, presumably something that most students will be much more interested in than an exactly analogous example using widgets. Teachers generally try to interest students by trying to relate the subject material to the students’ lives if possible. This is not exceptional.
For Christ’s sake, Leonard. Leonard, there are tons of widgets in economics.
If Econ 101 and what economics says about the minimum wage were true, everything you are asserting would make sense.
abb1, in PPP terms which would be more relevant here, that 22 francs would be closer to 10$ or 11$ (I’m gonna hedge here by saying that I don’t have the most up to date number under my nose – few years back real exchange rate was 2 rather then 1.25). In general Switzerland does not have min wages except for butchers (don’t ask me why). Add to that the fact that Geneva is just a bunch of watchmakers and bankers, rents are high – unskilled labor is relatively scarce – and that 22 francs/hr doesn’t look so crazy anymore. Just like I’m willing to bet the McDonalds in Palo Alto pays above US min wages, unlike the McDonalds in Jackson, Mississippi. This isn’t even to address the “Meticulously observed”.
And most demand curves DO slope downward (Veblen goods and so on are exceptions to the rule). What empirical evidence are we talking about here?
Can anyone recommend a few books (including one—I know there’s one out there but I can’t remember it—on sources of economic information) for a non-economist who wants to get beyond Econ. 101?
There was a thread on just this issue a little while back, right here at CT. Don’t have time to track down and link right now—anyone want to help out?
“because it suggests different ideas than what most people are born with or pick up from society.”
Brrrrrng! Do Marxists get to play now? As soon as we stop laughing? Umm, at the Manifestoon above, of course.
Brad, at 12, was pithy, insightful, and useful.
Null hypothesis: What you think of of as ‘right wing ideology’ is in fact the truth (or closer to it than anything else available). You just haven’t studied economics.
I don’t believe that for a moment. I’m with, I think Radek, who said that too many people leave before the “okay, now we explain why markets don’t work quite like how we told you last year” bit. And with Watson:
“Every year hordes of freshmen leave econ 101 with a muddle headed view of how the oversimplified mathematical fictions of models they’ve been show relate to the real world.”
The fault is not necessarily with the models (which are of necessity, fiction of a sort).
Now public choice is an unabashedly ideological approach to the world,
It is an unabashedly ideological approach to the world to study how governments make the choices they do and not just assume that they get everything right?
Charles Rowley appears to be explaining his own motives, and conducting an ad homimen attack on his opponents. If every area of study where participants have resorted to ad homimen attacks on their opponents is ideological then the post-modernists are right and nearly all of science is ideological. Certainly all of economics – I can’t be bothered digging up quotes but I’ve heard all sorts of ad homimen attacks from economists all over the spectrum – and a lot of ad homin attacks.
The interesting question is whether public choices theories are right, or more accurate than alternative approaches.
Anyway, this is case where ideology is in the eye of the beholder. What you see as ideology the speaker probably sees as the honest truth, and vice-versa. This is because ones’ view of the economy has so much impact on ones’ political views. When you talk about “perhaps more right wing than the actual theory itself would support, if it were looked at carefully.” – I suspect any conclusion drawn on this would depend on who was looking at the theory carefully, and what theory and evidence they looked it.
I find it an impressive piece of ideological bias that comment 10 talks about market failures, but never mentions government failures, though there is a lot of evidence that government also sometimes fails disastrously. Jasper probably doesn’t think himself ideologically biased though.
I would be deeply surprised if many people, on entering a study of the economy, did not find their views changing. For views not to change, it would mean either that by sheer coincidence their ignorant views all happened to concord with the new evidence and arguments they encountered, or that their views were impervious to argument or evidence.
“Can anyone recommend a few books (including one—I know there’s one out there but I can’t remember it—on sources of economic information) for a non-economist who wants to get beyond Econ. 101?”
Try (Nobel laureate) Joe Stiglitz: Whither Socialism? (MIT Press 1994). But his textbook on: Economics of the Public Sector (Norton 2000) and his current topical assessment of: Making Globalization Work – The Next Steps to Global Justice (Allen Lane 2006) make for much easier reading for non-economists.
My nonexpert view is that economics is quite complex methodologically. It move between being an emperical science, a branch of philosophy (concerned with defining rationality, or sometimes ethics), a branch of mathematics, and perhaps sometimes a religion. I believe a lot of dissatisfaction with economics comes from this mixture and the equivocations to which it sometimes leads.
Above, John Emerson commented:
“To me disentangling the empirical content and usable understanding from the other shit would be a noble enterprise. (I’m aware that Quine has proved that to be impossible).”
Take heart; all Quine proved is that is impossible to do it uniquely. As far as I’m concerned the result any reasonable attempt would be a laudable contribution.
Is there any other science in which students are normally started off on stuff that they have to unlearn later? It doesn’t strike me that any other science have the kind of differences between theory and practice that economics has. My guess is that economics over-theorized and is slow about dumping the excess.
Left undisturbed or unopposed any form of thought will tend to distill itself down to a pure form, and purity is solipsism: it recognizes only itself. So philosophy becomes the philosophy of self-description as opposed to the attempted description of the world, and art becomes ‘art for art’s sake,’ as opposed to the description of perception and to the degree that it is possible, of the perceived.
‘Economic’ logic, in daily life, comes into conflict with other forms of obligation. It only makes sense that left on it’s own, opposed by nothing in an academic bubble, ‘economics’ would become what it has: the Greenbergian Formalism of the study of human behavior.
Okay. I promise, I’m done now.
It’s not unlearn, its build on. Well, countercyclical wages they have to unlearn, but that’s the freakin’ textbooks.
What’s so crazy about saying “here’s a baseline model that holds under these assumptions”, then say, “ok now relax assumption no. 1, what happens?” then say, “flip the switch on assumption no. 1 back to on and flip assumption no. 2 to off, what happens?” then go on to assumption no. 3, 4 etc. That’s, roughly, how most of this stuff is taught.
Is there any other science that works that way?
Roy,
Yes, it isn’t the fault of the models per se. I actually had a line about that in my post but it was inarticulate and I didn’t have time to fix it.
I do think that since economists know that many people will leave with a half-baked understanding of what economists actually think, let alone the `truth’ of it—- that pedagogical honesty demands they make more clear that the simplified models they produce do have problems. At least more clear than my anectdotal experience suggests they are making it.
Tracy W. I think all would hope that a process of education changes peoples views, and I don’t think any here was arguing it shouldn’t. One has to be careful about circular reasoning though.
Economics isn’t half way to the `science’ some economists & wonks seem to think it is, let alone approaching something with a solid theoretical background like, say, physics. It’s one thing to say that you expect anyone after a study of physics to believe that they are on to something deep with quantum physics (even without agreeing that the standard model is all that), quite another to say you expect students of economics to come out in agreement with policy driven by neoclassical economics.
Hmm, the fact that people actually argue about whether economics is a “science like physics” or even just feel compelled to pronounce the fact that “economics is not a science like physics” probably means it’s helluva closer to physics then other social sciences like Soc, Anthro etc. that don’t even get the privilaged of being compared to physics.
I’d have to say that what’s in the article is a pretty true reflection of my own experience (VUW Wellington NZ) in a stage 1 equivalent Econ class: two rightwing lecturers teaching from Mankiw while pretending to be centrists).
As a lefty I still found it useful though, in the manner suggested by Brad Delong above.
Also, from the sounds of things, had I taken the paper through the Econ department rather than the School of Government I might have lucked on classes where an old-style Keynesian tore Mankiw to pieces, which would have been fun.
It means that economists have often tacitly or explicitly claimed that economics is a science like physics, but people don’t believe them because it isn’t. Economists sometimes seem to think that if you use enough math you become scientific eventually. They also use that as a screen to hide behind—“Obviously you don’t understand the math.”
One problem is that there are a lot of useless or detrimental artifacts in economics deriving from attempt to seem like physics. Physicists occasionally laugh at economists’ math.
Brad – I agree and would even go a little further. Starting from assumptions of rationality, narrow self interest and so on is an excellent way of assaying the worth of left wing arguments under unfavorable conditions. Lots of lefty arguments assume that humans are more or less benign and sociable. They may sometimes be right – but making assumptions of this sort also allows lefties to load the dice. If, in contrast, lefty arguments still work when the dice are loaded against them, say, by assuming the kinds of stark clashes of interest that are often modelled in game theory, it suggests that these arguments are likely to be robust under a variety of assumptions and conditions.
John – I have an anecdote along these lines myself. I took my grad game theory class in the econ dept, b/c no-one in pol-sci taught it. It was given by a professor who left shortly afterwards to become a minister in the Conservative Spanish government. In the early weeks of the course, he tried to get us to understand the concept of equilibrium by making us “play” (i.e. suggest moves in) a variety of two person games with equilibria that implied that people wouldn’t want to cooperate etc. When he tried this with the centipede game, everyone except me and my partner played Defect, Defect on the first move, because that was clearly what the professor expected us to do. But in fact he’d accidentally misspecified the payoffs on the blackboard, and the actual equilibrium was Cooperate, Cooperate. Because everyone else assumed that the lesson was that cooperation was irrational, nobody (except me and my mate, I’m proud to say) had done the bloody backward induction.
Rhadamanthus – I’ve complained occasionally about the ideological bias in political science before, as best as I can remember, and certainly about the politics that certain varieties of literary theory tend towards.
Radek – I have an idea that someone may have run this experiment with econ students and dictator games somewhere. I’ll try to look it up. Jean Ensminger does fascinating anthropological research on how these games play out in different cultures. On the Arrow-Solow thing – my understanding of the history of econ teaching is that there has been a pretty radical shift over the last thirty years, from elite economists subscribing to vaguely liberal or sometimes left wing views with a strong dose of technocracy to a much more unambiguously pro-market perspective; Paul Samuelson giving way to Martin Feldstein. I also perceive a bit of a push back against this in the last few years, but only a bit. This isn’t to say that the previous set of attitudes wasn’t equally as ideological as the current set, but that in neither instance does the ideology inevitably flow from the basic toolkit of economics (both Samuelson and Feldstein are committed to mathematical modelling).
Tracy W – nice try but no cigar. Rowley isn’t setting out his idiosyncratic prejudices – he’s explicitly defining a field, and doing so in unabashedly ideological terms. Look it up. Nor is he a minor figure in that field – he’s one of the major institution builders (his intellectual contribution isn’t on the level of Buchanan and Tullock imo, but he is clearly a very important gatekeeper). The Edward Elgar series also counts plays a major role in defining subfields within economics – they collect together classic articles in those fields and are pretty widely used in my experience. If you really want to make the claim that public choice isn’t a strongly ideological program of endeavour, you’ll have your work cut out for you. Again – I don’t think that public choice is without value or insight by any means – but it is clearly and explicitly bound up with a set of political priorities, as Rowley happily acknowledges.
terence – Mankiw is a Keynesian. A New Keynesian but when it comes down to it differences are slight. Active monetary policy rather than active fiscal policy. Emphasize sticky prices rather than fixed nominal wages (counter-freakin-cyclical wages again). So you probably wouldn’t have noticed any difference.
JE - show me an economist that claims that economics is like physics. Most of the time you rather get something like “because controlled experiments are impossible/unethical in economics, it is not a science in the same way as physics”. If physicists laugh at economists’ math then that’s their problem – it’s not like we get the math wrong. It may not be as fancy (most of the time) but neither does it need to be.
Physicists laugh because physicists use the minimum amount of math that they need, whereas economists use as much math as they cram in.
Economists always pull rank on everyone else, and you tried to do it yourself in 56.
“as they can cram in”.
I think that there are two basic issues here:
1. Does having a necessarily simplistic view of economics bias one rightwards?
2. Do rightish profs bias their students further right than the material demands?
So, issue 1: Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t (I took no econ in college, so have no anecdote to throw on the fire), but if it does, tough cookies. You can’t get a nuanced, deep understanding of any subject in the first year, so until we get knowledge rays that smack us all with a post-grad education in seconds, then the dichotomy is: no knowledge biases you in idiotic ways, some knowledge biases you in slightly less idiotic ways.
As to subject 2: Probably they do. People are, as a general rule, lousy at controlling for their own biases. If most economics profs are right-of-center or right-wing, then at least a subset of them are going to fail to correct for their biases (or not try), and that’s that.
Some people upthread mentioned that econ classes must be far from alone in college classes in terms of influencing the political views of their students. I’d like to take that point a bit further and say that there are college classes which directly address important policy questions besides economics.
For example, I took a Constitutional Law class in college (as an undergrad—not law school stuff). Did my prof have an ideology? Of course he did—I doubt very much that any con law professor ever was apolitical. Did his biases affect his teaching? Sure, to some extent. Did I get a nuanced and complete understanding of constitutional law from one semester of undergrad? Let’s not be ridiculous. Did it affect my politics? Of course it did.
Similarly, almost any recent history class, from say WWII onwards, probably directly touches on a policy question or two. Most of those students will not go on to become experts in the subject and thus will probably take obvious and uncomplicated lessons from what they learned, unmitigated by the more complex and nuanced whole of the information at hand. And their professors’ views will doubtless influence them.
So what?
I don’t get what there is to rail about, here. Sure, it would be nice if we could package up all of our learning in nice apolitical balls, but that will never, ever, ever happen. Everyone will be tugged in various directions by various authority figures, and everyone will come to a large number of opinions based on simplistic analyses. Is there anything to this post and the ensuing debate that doesn’t come down to Harry having a pet peeve about one of uncountably many examples of this general rule?
My apologies. In my post above, I said “Harry” when I meant “Henry.” No offense was meant.
Michael, have you ever heard of “the liberal university”. It’s not liberals who are making noise about that. In part, this thread is just a way of pointing out that the university is not uniformly liberal.
Speaking only for myself, I am not convinced that the simplifications of intro economics are justified by the arguments given for them. Nor do I believe that the political skew of the oversimplification is accidental or neutral. In general I would agree with the hypothetical “If economics is right about most things, and if intro econ is taught as well as possible given the difficulty of the material, and without overt bias (in the sense of concealing or misrepresenting inconvenient material), then no one should complain if intro econ changes people’s political views”. It’s the premises that I doubt.
“economists use as much math as they cram in.”
John I think this was much more true about twenty + years ago at the high point of “high theory” and general equilibrium. When I went through grad school you had professors making snarky comments about “pointless but complicated existance proofs” and the like. But I’m not gonna deny that sometimes this doesn’t happen. At the same time I think a lot of economic ideas that survive for any length of time are of the “simple but counter intuitive” variety.
Economists always pull rank on everyone else, and you tried to do it yourself in 56.
Hmmm, yes I did. If a mathematician is a general, and a physicist a colonel, then economists are captains (highest junior officers), the rest of social sciences various ranks of lieutenants, historians are seargants, philosophers corporals, the rest of humanities privates, and business and communications are the whores who follow an army.
(I saved major space there for chemists, biologists and the like for the sake of literary flow)
“economists use as much math as they cram in.”
John I think this was much more true about twenty + years ago at the high point of “high theory” and general equilibrium. When I went through grad school you had professors making snarky comments about “pointless but complicated existance proofs” and the like. But I’m not gonna deny that sometimes this doesn’t happen. At the same time I think a lot of economic ideas that survive for any length of time are of the “simple but counter intuitive” variety.
Economists always pull rank on everyone else, and you tried to do it yourself in 56.
Hmmm, yes I did. If a mathematician is a general, and a physicist a colonel, then economists are captains (highest junior officers), the rest of social sciences various ranks of lieutenants, historians are seargants, philosophers corporals, the rest of humanities privates, and business and communications are the whores who follow an army.
(I saved major space there for chemists, biologists and the like for the sake of literary flow)
Well, what is it that they say about middle management? Enough power to be blamed when things go wrong but not enough to command respect?
“Is there any other science in which students are normally started off on stuff that they have to unlearn later?”
Physics. Every heard of Newtonian and Einsteinian mechanics?
John Emerson:
Physics. Students usually start off with the Newtonian stuff, which is right under most circumstances, but tends to break down under stress (e.g., the kind induced by traveling at near-light speeds).
This makes a good analogy to economics. It’s not, as some of you are suggesting, that Econ 101 and Newtonian mechanics are WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. It’s just that they’re oversimplifications—-but serviceable oversimplifications that give the student a much better understanding of the way the world works than he had before.
John:
Of course I’ve heard of the “Liberal University.” It’s maddening when conservatives carry on about it, too. I’m personally not a fan of, “the other side is being annoying, so we must be annoying in exactly the same way” as a philosophy of life.
One interesting area of economics is the market for ideologies or in Glaser’s terms the market for “frames”. One consequence being that people are more likely to hold incorrect views (such as racial prejudice) if there is little cost to doing so.
Radek, Oh economists get the math wrong too sometimes, but that’s ok, so do the physicists on occasion. That isn’t the reason that anyone is laughing. The laughter comes from a feeling that economists are sometimes going about things backwards. Sometimes physicists will start with an idea of the physics and end up with a model they can’t handle. Then they’ll simplify the model, or create new math, until they can handle it. All the while keeping something sensible to say about the error invovled. Fair or not, there is a perception that economists sometimes start with a model they think they can handle, and attempt to make economics fit it.
The reason for the physics comparisons is simple. Economists bring it upon themselves by being prickly about the claims about science. Experimental physics, at least, is the canonical example of a physical science with a strong theoretical underpinning and good empirical data. Both these aspects are weak in economics, so the comparison between physics and economics are stark.
You don’t have to unlearn Newtonian mechanics for any of the phenomena it’s used to explain. And a combined form is often easily found—for example, the conservation of matter is now the conservation of matter-energy. As far as I know, physics students are not taught
As far as I know, physicists acknowledge the simplifying assumptions of physics (friction, air resistance, a rigid earth with the mass concentrated at the center) either right at the beginning, or whenever asked. Whereas in economics the nature of the simplifying assumptions seem frequently to be forgotten, and the fictional simplified system taken as real.
Radek will disagree, but I think that what Keen said about Friedman’s “Positive Economics” in “Debunking Economics” is pretty convincing.
One thing commentators may be missing is the potential influence of the huge punditry machine dedicated to establishing that economics “proves” Republican and right-wing politics are Scientifically Correct, and all Democrats and/or Liberals are Against Science. Physics doesn’t have this sort of abuse.
It does, but not most egregiously by right-wing pundits (though religionists do sometimes use arguments from cosmology). Instead, quantum mechanics in particular is abused by New Ageish self-help writers to “prove” that your consciousness has quantum effects on the world that will let you change things by wishing.
“People are more likely to hold incorrect views (such as racial prejudice) if there is little cost to doing so.”
I had a discussion about this and really don’t get it. Supporters of Hitler and Stalin paid a terrible price. I think that the issue is something like “predictable cost”. Even so, the Germans could have known that a lot of them would die in the wars Hitler was abviously going to start.
Physicists laugh because physicists use the minimum amount of math that they need, whereas economists use as much math as they cram in.
Physicists’ use of math drives mathematicians crazy: how, they wonder, do physicists ever get anything right when they’re so atrociously sloppy? Part of it is that (some) physicists have the real world to test things against; another is that the anomalous corner cases that mathematicians love most are the things that the physicists handwave away as a subset of measure zero.
Matt McI, fortunately these ideas are wrong, or else New Agers would be doing a lot of damage by levitating thengs and so on. And I bet they wouldn’t just cure cancer if they could, I bet that the mean ones would by sending cancer rays at bad people.
Watson – give me a concrete example of where the economists are doing what you say what they’re doing because my sense is that the process works essentially the same as in physics. And note that now we’re arguing two somewhat opposite things – on one hand (yes, that hand) economists are being accused of too much math, and on the other (yup) of simplifying things too much in their undergrad courses.
The part of Keen where he talks about Friedman’s views on methadology is the only part where he’s half making sense or getting things sort-of, well-maybe, if-I-squint-really-hard-I-can-see-it, right. I wouldn’t call it convincing though.
(Somebody in charge please delete that accidental, much regretted, double post)
I’ve seen some threaten to.
McI, I have some polarized organic water that will protect you from cancer rays. I wish I could give it to you for free, but it costs me money to make it.
Radek, those two criticisms are not mutually contradictory. The “simplifications” of Econ 101 mostly consist of presenting an elegant model that doesn’t usually work as the standard, without qualifying it.
I just don’t think that marginalist theory is comparable to Newtonian physics.
I just don’t think that marginalist theory is comparable to Newtonian physics.
No one said that it is. A better analogy would be with evolutionary biology and arguments over which mechanism is more important in generating change over time, or quibbles about the specific evolution of particular traits. It’s not like you can breed dinosaurs in the laboratory, just like you can’t arbitrarily change folks’ income or prices and see what happens. Even there I think economics comes up a bit short of standards of evolutionary biology, due largely to the nature of the subject.
Re: 56
“Hmm, the fact that people actually argue about whether [astrology] is a “science like physics” or even just feel compelled to pronounce the fact that “economics is not a science like [astrology] probably means it’s helluva closer to physics then other [pretend] sciences like [numerology], [divination], [tarot reading], etc. that don’t even get the privilaged of being compared to physics.”
Darn. That should be “[astrology] is not a science like physics.”
Dude, people DON’T argue about whether astrology is like physics. Try harder.
I’ve never actually taken a college economics class, despite my purported interest in Keynes, Robinson, and their crowd. However, I did take AP microeconomics in high school and can assure you that, in the hands of a coach-cum-social studies teacher, “free markets RULE” is how the material is interpreted.
Radek, I think econ more than a bit short of of even the evolutionary biology analogy, not because of the nature of the subject but because I’m not at all convinced that you have a overall theory that hangs together nearly as well as evolution does. Not being an expert in either though, I’m willing to be convinced it is closer than I think.
You’re quite correct that there are two things being argued. I think the main contention of the econ 101 argument is that it is presented as is there were such a both solid and deep overarching theory to pin everything too. Of course nobody denies the problems of introductory courses—- the claims seem to be that econ 101 is often done less honestly in this way than, say intro physics, and there are not pedagogical reasons for it. This matches my experience, but I don’t have any particular stake and a wary of sample bias.
As far as the modeling question goes. Matt is quite right that many physicists drive mathematicians nuts with sloppy mathematics, even moreso that economists drive physicists nuts, I’d say. No point in digressing further into a discussion of mathematical rigour. John is quite right that the two claims are not incompatable. Further, you misread one of them, at least as I understand it. It isn’t that economists use too much math but that they use math for the sake of using it. I’ve read a couple commentaries on this that I found reasonable; but can’t produce a careful analysis immediately. I’m just as happy to look at it when I have some time, or to leave it in the interest of not arguing those seperable points in this one thread. It is a bit wandering already.
What’s closer to physics as a subject of study: Poker or European history?
Who is closer to being a physicist: an automobile mechanic or an anthropologist?
Who would be better at describing the differences between the Swedish and Italian economies: a physicist or a historian?
I’d be happy to accept the claim that economics is closer to physics than are other social sciences if you’d accept the downgrading of economics, and economists, to the position and the prestige (give or take) of statisticians.
16 above says, On the other hand, the most boring people I met were the economics students, who were distracted with weighing data and doing regression analysis. Economics graduate students are some of the most boring people in the world. Have you ever met any of them? Just be honest with yourselves. Take the honest, partly true stereotypes. … C’mon! Economists are dull. Their students are dull. Their subject matter is DULL, DULL, DULL. Are these really people who are guilty of deep ideological biases? It seems so psychologically implausible to me, just based on their personalities.
Well, according to one old saw, economists have good enough math skills to be actuaries, but lack the social skills.
With all this handwringing by liberals & leftists recently over “neoclassical indoctrination” and worrying over the very idea that immersing one’s self in one of the social sciences just might possibly alter their political or economic views, are we going to see similiar wave of worrying over whether exposure to undergraduate level sociology courses are indoctrinating our young people with egalitarian views & a passion for social justice? Me thinks not.
84: “Dude,” try a google search.
But I think you’re missing the point.
I think the argument that economists use too much math is really wrong, and rather separate from the ideological argument. The kinds of models that economists have invented are the strongest contribution the field has made to human understanding. In any really long chain of cause and effect, it’s hard to keep track of all of the moving parts. A model is a minimal test that what you are saying coheres into a consistent whole.
The danger of using models is that you’ll give short-shrift to anything that’s hard to model, so modelling has to be kept in its proper place. But within that place mathematical models are a step forward for social science.
What people say is that the models use more math than the data needs, and seem to say more than they really do. I can’t jusdge it hands-on, but I frequently hear people saying that the relationship between the model and reality is unclear or unimportant. It reminds me of analytic philosophy.
About the “is physics like economics?” question—as soon as I saw John Emerson’s question in 54, I immediately thought “Huh, that’s how I was taught physics.” So it was funny to see that very point pop up. But the real comparison is not Newtonian physics to more exotic physics, but various conservation assumptions.
I don’t think I’m an idiot, but I actually found it harder to unlearn the phsyical assumptions than the assumptions in micro and in growth models. For example, a very common move in an introductory class is to have objects(a chain or a rocket or something) whose mass changes… That is really hard to think about. Then, when you start relaxing multiple conservation assumptions at once, things get worse. If you phrased the question as “In which discipline is it harder to adapt one’s perspective and analytic toolbox to relaxed assumptions?” I would have to say, physics.
Obviously, physics has less relevance to the social world. When Physics 101 students remember the conservation rules instead of the exceptions, nothing bad happens.
On the meat of what Henry says about intro ec: I think the real problem is that intro ec classes normally don’t use math at all. That makes it difficult to grasp the important of parameters. (I should clarify that by math I mean calculus and statistics.)
Funnily enough, I sometimes think that neoclassical economics is really a branch of analytic philosophy. The purpose of most economic models is not to test against data, but to organize an argument. To the extent that you accept the premises, you can make a more convincing argument with a model than you can with just words. Most models involve quantities that are not actually observable, which makes them hard to test. As far as I can tell, economists use the models to extract qualitative predictions of the directions of effects, which is something they can test.
The problem with basic econ is not necessarily that it shifts political opinions to the right, but that it reinforces the beliefs of those students who are already right-wing on certain issues. Shifts in opinion might occur because old beliefs are being challenged. The problem is when a student goes into econ with right-leaning opinions on things like the minimum wage and comes out believing that there is a consensus among economists (or among “real economists”) that increasing the minimum wage hurts the very people it is trying to help.
The problem is that the people who are being “indoctrinated” by these classes are sometimes those who will end up playing important roles in shaping the economy or public policy. And these individuals will usually remain certain that things like minimum wages, welfare, etc., are generally damaging to the economy.
Having sat through the main econ sequence at a very pro-market school, I have my own memories of the sorts of free-market indoctrination that goes on in some econ departments. My favorite was the “welfare theorems”, which showed how welfare was maximized in free-market economies (partial equilibrium free-market economies, but this little tidbit was more of a footnote). The irony is that these “welfare theorems”, which were mostly about how consumer surplus was being maximized, were probably the most marxist thing in the whole class. The basic conclusion (from a marxist perspective) was that the wealthiest members of society benefitted greatly from the free-market, and the lower your purchasing power, the less you benefitted.
Radek, yes – naturally the prices are generally higher – especially where local manual labor is involved – but still the resulting equilibrium is such that any full time job provides pretty much middle-class standard of living.
And yes, of course there are special circumstances (not so much watchmakers and bankers, but rather tens of thousands of well-paid internationals), but nevertheless, it definitely proves something.
I can easily imagine how it could’ve been different here, with the minimum wage of 5chf/hour – accompanied, naturally, by higher crime level, poverty and so on – and the economists saying that raising minimum wage to 10chf/hr would ruin everything and 20chf/hr is just a completely ludicrous idea.
Radek,
True Mankiw is a New-Keynesian. But the professor involved was – like I said – a good ol’ fashioned Keynesian – liquidity traps and fiscal stimulus and all that.
Moreover, while Mankiw the economist may see a place for a counter-cyclical state his politics are still those of a classical liberal (which IIRC is how he has described himself). And his bias run’s all the way through his text book (albeit subtly). Which is why it strikes me as great that the university could find someone to teach across its politics.
Most of this discussion is about micro (e.g., supply & demand & minimum wages). But I think the implicit message of undergraduate macro is much more liberal. It’s all about Keynesian models of how the government can fight recessions.
Personally, I think that economists’ greatest contribution to humanity is the idea of measuring the unemployment rate, which basically happened after WWII. Before that, the idea that the government should step in to reduce unemployment was much less accepted, particularly among the elites who might have taken college econ classes.
I was taught first-year microeconomics by a card-carrying communist. That was in 1983-4. He knew his stuff and was obsessed that you weren’t a real economist if you didn’t have the nuts and bolts of the math straight. Theorems, proofs, Walras, Debreu, Lindahl. Sure, you could pass your exam and have a career, but you’d always be a charlatan.
In support of leederick (#3), Jean Ensminger (in her “Making a Market”, p. 12, n15) notes:
”Experimental economics has demonstrated… that economics majors show the lowest level of cooperation… It remains to be seen whether this reflects the fact that more self-interested people are drawn to economics or that those who have internaliazed the ideology of homo economicus consider it legitimate to practice what they preach and avoid at all costs the “sucker” designation”
This is the Ensminger, Henry refers to ((#59). Link to the book:
http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521574269
The reference she cites for this finding is Marwell/Ames: “Economists free ride, does anyone else? Experiments on the provision of public good, IV” Journal of Public Economics 15, 1981.
I have not read the original article, so I do not know how they designed the experiment, but I think Radek (#34) is onto something: A proper ‘real-life test’ (as opposed to the setting up of a game whose results have no consequences outside of the laboratory) would focus on how much is contributed by groups with different types of education. Such a test would then have to distinguish between different scales of contributions.
Besides this, the best discussion of this that I am familiar with is a paper by Jack Knight and James Johnson, “On the Priority of Democracy”. Their discussion departs from one of the most used textbooks in economics and attempts (succeeds, on my view) to show how economic theory (and political science theory inspired by this) confuses analytic and explanatory tasks which results in an overly optimistic view of the functioning of markets. I don’t know if this is the paper Henry writes about, but it is very, very good indeed. Radek, you in particular would be interested in it.
Link: http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/politics/seminars/knight_s05.pdf
I tried this on another thread and got completely ignored by the ‘real’ economists, but what does everyone think about the arguments put forward in ‘The Death of Economics’ by Ormerod and Hodgson’s ‘How Economics Forgot History’ (both of which I have actually read). Also, what about the criticisms of the ‘post-autistic’ revolt? (http://www.paecon.net/).
Essentially, Ormerod argues that all the fantastically complex, incredibly hard to understand mathematical models of the ‘economy’ that economists have struggled so hard to build are (for the most part) worthless because they don’t actually predict anything (or at least nothing important) in the real world. Hodgson, on the other hand, argues on philosophical grounds that the whole AIM of modern economics (to create ‘timeless’ ‘abstract’ ‘laws’ of economics) is incoherent, as economics is not a science in the same sense as physics (in other words, economics should model itself on biology, or, better still, anthropology or sociology, and become a more or less purely empirical science (botany would be another example)).
(Ducks for cover and waits for aggressive abuse from economists).
Just thought I would add another note to get vaguely back on topic….I think the ‘left wing’ critique of economics can be summed up with the phrase: ‘the markets ain’t free’, with the rider that they never have been, they never will be, and to argue whether or not ‘free markets’ would or would not be a good thing is like arguing whether or not the Invisible Pink Unicorn would or would not be a good thing. This is also why libertarianism, fundamentally, makes no sense.
There was another paper on a similar subject:
http://www.vwa.unisg.ch/RePEc/usg/dp2004/dp18_kir.pdf
“On the other hand, academic economists are today with respect to their political identifications – on the average – significantly right of the general public. This also holds for the United States, as R.F. HAMILTON and L.L. HARGENS (1993) show. They report the results of a survey taken in 1984. According to those, only 27.7 percent of economics professors identified themselves as being left or liberal, compared to 39.5 percent of all 4,944 professors asked, 66.1 percent of political scientists and even 78.4 percent of sociologists.”
“And if we have good reasons and see economics as a social science, the discussion about indoctrination versus self-selection is not very interesting. This holds not only because it is extremely implausible that there is not at least some indoctrination, or, to say it somewhat more friendly, learning in this respect. It should be obvious that the study of economics changes the perception individuals have of the market mechanism; we who are teaching economics would miss our job if this would not be the case.”
Brendan, I’m just reading Hodgson right now, but I’m even less of an economist than you are.
For him the comparison with evolutionary biology made by Radek above (or with other historical, non-conservative, non-equilibrium systems) would be useful, but this has negative consequences for neoclassical and most other forms of orthodox economics. Mirowski and Georgescu-Roegen have written of this too.
#66: If a mathematician is a general, and a physicist a colonel, then economists are captains…
Radek, the last twenty-five years of philosophy of science called and wants a word with you.
If that doesn’t do it for you, I suggest you take a look at McKenzie’s “An Engine, not a Camera” and Callon’s “The Laws of the Markets.” The History and Sociology of Science seem to be doing a pretty good job describing why economics is and will always be more like the other social sciences than a physical science.
Of course they ignore you, Brendan. Remember, this is a matter of ignorant outsiders challenging their betters. One cannot have competent insiders challenging neoclassicals.
I’m actually published demonstrating that wages cannot be determined by supply and demand, given perfect competition, no transactions costs, no information assymetries, etc. The model is incoherent. What’s novel about my contribution is a neat graph I thought up, not the argument itself which has been ignored for decades.
At least one of the articles on experiments in which economic students fail to cooperate also contains data on charitable contributions.
(Re: #13) Larry Summers trots out the simplistic argument about how sexual discrimination does not occur in everybody’s favorite recent silliness from him. Is he a “libertarian”? Was he teaching intro?
On intro teaching and public discourse: lots of pop science books and SF have made it part of the culture that intro Newtonian mechanics doesn’t apply somewhere or other. Contrast to neoclassical economics.
I already have a few comments on my blog.
Autism is one of the defining characteristics of 20th century thought.
As I mention occasionally my one well known article is on autism and modern art: Jarry, Duchamp, to Warhol and conceptualism. Wittgenstein of course. The anti-theater of Robert Wilson. Formalist cinema. Orders that describe time as loss and a terror of death.
Atemporal perfection. The esthetic behind the logic of analysis and synchrony. etc etc.
I get ignored too
RE #40, I would recommend two books: ‘Basic Economics’ by Thomas Sowell is a well-written book that takes a conservative view, and ‘Peddling Prosperity’ by Paul Krugman from the liberal side. And in keeping with Brad DeLong’s point, I think that if you just read one book, you should read from the other side. This should provide the layman a reasonably nuanced view for relatively little investment in time and money.
I am an economic conservative, but I have to admit that Europe’s economy is surprisingly robust despite seemingly breaking every economic law in the books. However, there are two areas that really stand out as problems: the high unemployment rate overall (and don’t give me the bogus hidden unemployment defense), and the concentrated unemployment among the young and immigrants. See also: the unemployment among young muslims in France that runs up to 40% at the time of last year’s Paris Riots. The high minimum wages and the job protection laws are a much better explanation for this than racism.
Back on the topic of Intro to Econ courses: My experience was strikingly similar to Chris Hayes’s in the article. I took an Intro to Micro Econ course with a professor whose graduate committee consisted of Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and Robert Mundell. Needless to say, he was quite a free-market proselytizer. One of the many opinions he offered as pure fact was that unions exist only to allow their leaders and organizers to get rich off of union dues. It’s been years, so I can’t remember many other specific examples (except for one personal anecdote involving policemen and money that was probably illegal and he clearly should have kept to himself), but at the time a friend and I kept a running tab of his biased comments (though we kept our dissatisfaction to ourselves, unlike conservative students who seem to like starting websites to complain about professors’ politics).
Now, I was a senior who’d already read a fair amount of economics and taken an upper-level econ course prior to regressing to Intro to Micro. So, I could spot most of this professor’s editorializing. Yet, I wondered how many of the freshman and sophomores in the course could. (His tests reflected his biases, too. But, they were very easy if you just gave him what he wanted to hear.)
Obviously, every discipline has its own “biases,” but I think one key difference is the way in which economists (faculty and students) assert their opinions. Often, these opinions are presented as if they’re unassailable facts. This was certainly the stance my Intro to Micro Econ professor took. In contrast, to use just one example, my Intro to Sociology professor actively encouraged us to challenge and question his lectures and our readings. In fact, that was built-in to the class, whereas my Intro to Micro Econ professor never allowed deviation from his lectures and often sarcastically shot down any questions or comments that pushed back against his rhetoric (of which there were very few).
Another (small) example of learning something which is frankly wrong in physics that you have to unlearn later: structure of the atom. The “electrons are little balls wizzing around in circular orbits about the nucleas” deal. This drove me crazy in high school, because I already knew about electron cloud orbitals, and I tried to get the teacher to at least say in class, “By the way, the thing I’m currently teaching is a simplification, not really up-to-date,” even if he wouldn’t go into details about the quantum-mechanical model. But he wouldn’t.
#107 …the unemployment among young muslims in France that runs up to 40% at the time of last year’s Paris Riots. The high minimum wages and the job protection laws are a much better explanation for this than racism.
Minimum wage and job protection laws are a better explanation for unemployment among young muslims? Weird.
#109: You have to be a little easy on high school teachers—- sometimes they know not what they teach.
112 was a little flippant because I’m just heading out the door. I just meant that there is an understandable reluctance to open up cans of worms at that level, especially if it can quickly lead to ground the instructor is weak on.
I agree with John Emerson’s take on economics-as-science.
It’s pushing it to attribute any type of scientific credibility to economics. It’s a game, and the rules of the game depend on the ideological perspective of the players. Aside from horse racing and online gambling, few games involve such artful deployment of smoke-and-mirrors as economics.
The models of science derive from tangibles that are separate from the personal convictions and prejudices of the actors. While there are certain givens in economics i.e. market forces, we are still dealing with abstracts that are then determined by the ideological slant or wishful thinking of the analysts. Even if there is such a thing as a politically neutral and dispassionate economist, he or she will still have a pet personal theory that might serve as a good tool for interpretation, but that in no way can be dignified as science.
The really annoying tendency that I’ve noticed about economists with Republican colors, is that even as Bush fucks up in every way imaginable, they coolly point to the figures as though the deeper truths enshrined in economic theory can somehow give a shine to a turd.
Economics is a slimy business, and most good economists are some variety of reptile.
112, That was my COLLEGE professor. Not a high school teacher.
That reminds me of another anecdote from the class. The first day, the professor went over a list of economic goals/values, such as growth, efficiency, equitable distribution of wealth, etc.
Just as the article discussed, the equitable distribution of wealth goal/value fell by the wayside fairly quickly, while efficiency stayed with us as the centerpiece of his course.
#112/watson aname: I assume that was directed at my comment (now #110), as #109 seems not to be directed at high school stuff.
In this case, he did know all about orbitals—I talked with him about it after class. But, while it kind of upset me at the time, I don’t really have a problem with it today. I’m just pointing out that there are plenty of places where new students get taught things that simply aren’t true, or are simplified to the point where you can draw lots of incorrect conclusions.
Evolutionary biology is another one that’s particularly bad that way, or at least was for me. You get basically no sense of any of the changes to the theory since Darwin, and also nothing about the ways in which “evolutionarily advantageous” differs from “behaviour which would benefit the animal or its pack or species.” Which has, in my experience, led to some pretty silly ideas.
This discussion is fascinating, but it is astounding how much the debate over the minimum wage remains ideological. Sure,