If you’re trying to promote your site, Dick, this silly stuff turns out to matter.

I don’t know if it was deliberate, so I gave you the benefit of the doubt.

Anyway, it would have been helpful to have separate catgories for original as opposed to mostly derived blog topics. Many economics blogs I noticed have a lot of similarity since they mostly reference the same material.

No. Chemical Engineering is what wannabe chemists who realise they suck in the lab decide to do instead.

Regards,

Sock Puppet of Sucky Reaction Yields

Before WWII, major economics departments were much more heterogeneous places than they became after the War.

And the exclusively analytic orientation of most American philosophy departments goes back to the 1950s, I think (see John McCumber’s Time in the Ditch for a political explanation of this, or Simon Glendinning’s The Idea of Continental Philsophy for a more internal, philosophical explanation).

The recent reconfiguration of the Notre Dame econ department is a case in point. It was motivated by rankings, and had the effect of squelching an interesting and unique tendency. Mirowski’s student will become unemployable.

If the division were made, then the applications of economics would vary according to the practical purposes in view. But in fact, theoretical economics is also practical economics, and the applications are tacitly wired in. Economists who are not free-market ideologues don’t seem like real economists, because theoretical economics favors a limited range of applications (mostly maximizing the GNP).

It’s really a toxic stew of philosophical delusion. Economists claim to be value-free “real scientists”, and this allows the free-market ideologues to claim precedence over economists who take extreconomic factors into consideration. But theoretical economics isn’t non-normative; it’s crypto-normative. The norms of the theoretical-applied economic chimera are tacitly wired into the theory by exclusions and stipulations. Since unexpressed, these crypto-norms are uncriticizable.

Labor economics, environmental economics, and feminist economics are held in low repute within the field because they are not “purely scientific”. This is another way of saying that they are forms of applied economics governed by explicit practical criteria different from, or additional to, the implicit practical criteria wired into theoretical economics.

The idea that a non-normative pure science should have precedence over normative thinking for practical purposes is, of course, horrible and ridiculous. How can you have any applications without normative thinking? But many economists, perhaps most, think something like this.

Sometimes economists tip their hands by bending their own rules when discussing labor questions, feminist questions, or environmental questions. But usually the tacit wired-in norms of the theory are sufficient.

Amartya Sen and Hilary Putnam are good authors to read on these questions.

Moreover, our Proovost’s office has spent the better part of the past year hectoring faculty to respond to quesitonaires sent for the updated NRC rankings of departments.

I definitely think of MaxSpeak as an economics blog, but have never thought of CT as one. That’s because of the content of the posts, not the academic qualifications of the bloggers.

Thus neatly sidestepping the question of whether there is any such thing as “economics” as distinguished from political economy (and that setting aside the question of whether it all boils down to power (political) relationships in the end).

Cranky