Caltech Social Science PhD? The only thing revolutionary about that PhD program is that it combines all the social sciences into one department. The economics department is mainstream, except it focuses on 3 main fields. Same goes for the other sub-fields.

Thanks for that link. Very interesting guy. This article further confirms a hunch of mine about where any radical reorientation that might take place within academic economics; why the United States itself. If we combine the SFI Research program and Caltech’s Social Sciences PhD, we already have a revolutionary new approach to Economics, that has the double kick of making graduate level Economics incredibly fascinating and stimulating, unlike the current teeth-pulling apprenticeship model.

Er, except that Milton Friedman argued for guaranteed income via negative income tax..

More generally, the evidence on ideology and economics is pretty clear-cut – again see Collander’s Making of an Economist. And you may be unhappy that the journalist asked me to comment because I am a political scientist (not a sociologist as your analogy implied, although I am quite pleased to be mistaken for one), and hence uninformed. However, I imagine that quite few mainstream economists have actually read Bowles, and fewer still have read his politically oriented work. Hence, there aren’t many of them qualified to assess him (not that I am particularly qualified either, as my post stressed, but at least I have read him). I would happily eat crow if, say, you could even point to one top thirty program with an intro to micro Ph.D. course that has his work on it. I did recommend that the journalist contact Lin Ostrom for an opinion, and he clearly did. You might of course object that she is merely another political scientist and hence not qualified to talk about economics; of course, the Nobel committee provided a quite different assessment of her ability to speak to economics last year. Really, in retrospect, I should have sent him to Cosma Shalizi, another totally unqualified person href=”http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/” rel=”nofollow”>http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/ who knows Sam’s work well, and has strong opinions about economics, approaches thereto etc.

The fact that journalists routine attribute strange strawmen to the economics profession baffles me – I see it as analogous to an article about sociologists being nothing but Marxists who don’t know how to do math, and some economists being quoted about the “revolutionary” mathematical theory being done by some sociologist. When journalists stereotype in areas they don’t understand, they should be corrected.

More constructively, on the polisci side of things I thought the recent Page&Winters article in Perspectives on Politics on Oligarchy in the US was interesting (though problematic in a whole number of ways):
http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1537592709991770 (unfortunately gated)

I had intended to point out that Sociology in the US has been, and remains, interested in inequality – for example David Grusky at Stanford (Director of the Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality) and Paul DiMaggio at Princeton. And pretty much all of Rural Sociology in the US is concerned with poverty and inequality, which says something in itself no doubt.

It’s a bit ridiculous to believe that economics is a monolith of free market dogma. Just flip through the articles in the top journals! Even the Journal of Political Economy – published by U Chicago – is by no stretch a right-wing review. Indeed, some of the most powerful arguments for government action have come from economists; e.g., the “agency theory” problem for firms.

We shouldn’t feed quotes to journalists which totally misrepresent the nature of the field.