The Punchbags Of Notre Dame

I had somehow missed the whole story of the split economics department at Notre Dame, Daniel. Thanks for posting on it. A few thoughts:

1) Reading the first article that you link, it seems likely that dissolving the heterodox “Economics and Policy Analysis” department was in the works from the time of the split in 2003. From the start, Economics and Policy Analysis was prohibited from admitting new graduate students and it’s never been allowed to fill vacant faculty lines.

2) Despite one commenter at that link who blames those damn heterodox economists for starting the mess (“Had the hetrodox guys not tried to squeeze out the others when they had power, they in turn wouldn’t have been squeezed out when power shifted.”), this doesn’t seem to me to be an entirely local story, let alone a tale of heterodox intransigence. The whole affair speaks volumes about the way the mainstream economics profession in general deals with heterodoxy.

3) It’s the University of Notre Dame, not Notre Dame University.

It’s the University of Notre Dame, not Notre Dame University.

Once they start pronouncing [nÉ”tʁ dam] properly, they can start complaining about that…

re: Posner

This makes the motivation for his Atlantic blatherings even harder to understand.

I have to agree that it’s depressing that their heterodox department is being shut down. But to be fair to the other faculty members, I doubt there is anyone there who fits what Krugman described as “saltwater” economists. They just seem to have your garden variety labor, development, theory and petit Levitts. They don’t even appear to have more than 2 tenured macroeconomists.

Misguided as it may be, they just seem to want to be another mainstream economics department. The field is not that discredited (yet) make sense of that move.

To pick up on the part of Langton’s comment that makes sense, it’s true that Krugman’s fresh/salt is a distinction within orthodox or at least mainstream econ (though both are slippery, slipping terms). Krugman thinks in terms of a fresh+salt orthodoxy which keeps him inside the pale that keeps heterodoxy out.

But purges (first the institutionalists, then the marxists, then the post keynesians and austrians…) have their own momentum. You can see in David Levine et al. that tropes used against hets are being turned against Krugman (Krugman!) — he’s not really that mathematical, he’s not up on our literature, he’s a bit of a hack, he won’t accept all our assumptions. There’s some reflection on this in Krugman’s recent NYT magazine plaint, but that doesn’t extend to meditation on his own roles in boundary-maintenance.

ND has a world-class group of heterodox scholars, including well-published macroeconomists like Amitava Dutt and Jaime Ros. They also had, until they were split by their dean in 2003, a fine econ department with a range of orth and het approaches, which is as it should be. So we should push beyond Krugman’s rather crabbed arguments to make the case for an economics in which multiple paradigms flourish.

Please see further discussion here: http://www.heterodoxnews.com/n/htn88.htm

It’s the University of Notre Dame, not Notre Dame University.

And don’t forget the “du lac” part, which to my mind makes the place sound more Arthurian than Catholic, but that’s what they named it . . .

“du Lac”? No wonder they want freshwater types!

Really is a brilliant tactic. My Fine Antipodean Institution has done almost exactly the same thing to purge itself of those silly heterodox types. First, the department was split in two, half permitted to grow and the other half permitted to languish (administrative ‘setbacks’ / advertising ban meant lack of awareness among the student body that an alternative department existed, course offerings pared back, new hires not permitted, funding dropped, and dropped again).

Then the heterodox guys are dissolved altogether (‘sorry, you don’t have an undergrad major any more’) and sequestered off in ‘development studies’ or ‘public policy’ or ‘methodology in the social sciences’, i.e. departments where they will have

a) zero influence over the legions of undergrads being taught the same old rubbish,

b) zero collective bargaining power, and

c) the capacity to produce graduates with zero credibility.

…certainly aren’t any students who care enough to protest. What do you do?

A number of rigorously peer reviewed journals CJE, FE, JEI, JPKE, ROPE, RRPE apparently don’t count in citations when mainstream economists are doing the counting. Rating departments on a citation count, rather than by reading the scholarship produced by a department, arguably has something to do with running an university along business lines. It’s an institutionalized bureaucratic mechanism appropriate for a capitalism with large corporations and professional managers.

Why don’t some journals count? It has something to do with the whole heterodox/orthodox or non-mainstream/mainstream splits. That split seems to start in the late 1960s and 1970s when the heterodox at the time were purged at, say, Harvard and the heterodox decided they could find informed audiences for their scholarship by forming their own professional societies and journals.

You might see this potted history as reflecting in the economics profession the whole 1960s movements and then backlash movement. And the backlash is funded by extremely rich, crazed capitalists. This funding, along with thinktanks and other institutions actually predates the 1960s.

So this arguable threat to academic freedom in economics at Notre Dame perhaps does have something to do with the evolution of capitalism outside its gates. But, as far as I can see, it is not as direct as getting alumni to contribute to its endowment.

sir,

for better and for worse please do not confuse mr. levitt’s mickey mouse economics with the larger stigler/becker tradition at UofC nor confuse the latter with the department itself.

both are huge mistakes that only display utter ignorance about history of ecconomic thought in general and the history of the chicago school in particular.

regards
v

“People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage”. With the corollary that, for people of privilege, being seen to surrender any material part of their advantage may be an invitation to their complete destruction. Cf. ‘revolution of rising expectations’, European history, passim.

Ding! Godwin violation. Two-minute penalty.

I can only add that times are good for us economics nihilists. Krugman is trying to build a firewall around the Chicago School, which might be a good thing if it serves to destroy that school utterly, but there are really a lot of others who need firm discipline.

For decades there have been people writing about the intellectual authoritarianism of paradigm-enforcing academic disciplines for decades, and these people have been ignored for decades. Paradigm-enforcement is especially toxic when the Friedman Principle (that counterfactual assumptions are perfectly wonderful) is dogma.

Paradigm enforcement is not limited to economics. I am a bright, studious fellow with no credentials because, starting in 1966 or so (my undergrad junior year), I continually found that my career progress depended on my acceptance of paradigms which I was not allowed to question, and with which I did not agree. If had had run into just one tolerable paradigm at that time I’d be a much more successful and happier man (or woman, of course. Person, I mean).

Jeff Schmidt’s “Disciplined Minds”, Mirowski’s “Machine Dreams”, Preston’s “Analytic Philosophy: History of an illusion”, Redman’s “Economics and the Philosophy of Science”, McCumber’s “Time in the Ditch”, Reisch’s “How the Cold War transformed Philosophy” and many other books tell the history of paradigm-enforcement, which was associated with the increased integration of government and the university, often initially under military auspices during WWII.

Mirowski of Notre Dame’s “The Road from Mount Pelerin” tells about the rise of neo-liberalism, including but not limited to the Chicago School. The Chicago school had a political agenda from the beginning.

Only peripherally related, at my link: “Animal Spirits and The Confidence Man“. Herman Melville didn’t predict the recent crashes, but he analyzed its causes. “Irrational exuberance” describes American culture in toto.

“If had had run into just one tolerable paradigm at that time I’d be a much more successful and happier man (or woman, of course. Person, I mean).”

Or if, like most of us, you had realized that sometimes, in the service of higher goals (such as making a living) a certain amount of hypocrisy is called for.

A little later they did something similar with the Department of Social Anthropology, (—> Sociology and Anthropology) except that this time nearly the juice got lost in the transaction.

Not sure if this is this the same thing, but I applied for a job in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at the about-to-be-merged Manchester University (which I’ve never heard anybody call the Victoria University of Manchester). By the time I took it up, I was working in the School of Law at the just-merged University of Manchester; the political-systems people went to the School of Social Science, the number-crunchers went to the Centre for Census and Survey Research (a.k.a. the Cathie Marsh Centre) and the criminologists and “sociology of deviance” types went to Criminology, which for some reason didn’t stay in SoSS but went to Law. Criminology going to Law means that I can work with people who study criminal law and policing as well as people who study domestic violence and youth offending, so that’s good. On the other hand, if DASS had carried on I could have worked with people who study social movements and contentious politics, which is what I actually know about. But either way it’s a living, of sorts. What was the question again?

‘Jeff Schmidt’s “Disciplined Minds”, Mirowski’s “Machine Dreams”, Preston’s “Analytic Philosophy: History of an illusion”, Redman’s “Economics and the Philosophy of Science”, McCumber’s “Time in the Ditch”, Reisch’s “How the Cold War transformed Philosophy” and many other books tell the history of paradigm-enforcement, which was associated with the increased integration of government and the university, often initially under military auspices during WWII.’

All these books deal with economics or philosophy. And yet, clearly, all the social sciences have been influenced by the context of the Cold War (read, American Imperialism) . The so-called ‘Cognitive Revolution’ for example, in psychology, was clearly an attempt to turn psychology into a ‘cyborg science’: technocratic, mathematical, deterministic, reductionistic, with aims that fitted in with specific American military goals (the key sponsors of Artificial Intelligence) and ‘management science’ (cf Newell and Simon). There were also attempts to influence sociology/anthropology (cf Project Camelot): given the lacklustre and depoliticised nature of much modern sociology and anthropology these attempts were obviously successful. Have any books been written about this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Camelot

We want a Phil Mirowski stand-up talk on this NOW. Hellooo!!??

To focus on what strikes me as the most important question raised by this post: since when does d2 use the word “freaking”?

It’s the adjective back-formation of Freakonomics. Or if it’s not, then it should be.^1^ But I’m not sure what that has to do with Richard Posner. :(

^1^Just as “to freak” should mean “to identify a scenario which can be interpreted as a natural experiment that sounds to the layperson like a compelling verification of your point, but doesn’t all by itself satisfactorily refute the null hypothesis, which is probably nonetheless okay insofar as your goal is to shake up conventional wisdom about correlations and is not to prove a contrary correlation.”

His branch of ND economics is doomed. They have tenure, so they can’t be fired, but they’re being retrained for custodial duties and maintenance tasks.

You can make an argument that freshwater econ favors a pro-rentier, anti-labor interest. But as Schumpeter and many others have noted Marx had a far better story about the progressiveness of capitalism than orthodoxy, and for my money the Austrian theory of the entrepreneur is a closer description of reality and a more interesting defense of capitalism than anything neoclassical.

As an econ grad student I sat in in some school of management courses. If anyone was a tool of the capitalists it was these guys, right? And yet they were uninterested in paradigm-enforcement, contemptuous of most neoclassical theory, institutionalist in their practice, and open to post keynesian and austrian ideas.

Tony Lawson has argued that mathematical formalization is the core to econ orthodoxy; there is certainly an interest in being an immaculate, deductive science with no history, cut loose from the messiness of human societies.

Good to see John back around the place.

40: I think you’re just misunderstanding how these things will manifest in reality. The business school types, as capitalist tools, aren’t concerned with the state of their academy. They are interested in how to make money as a capitalist. So they need useful information. Their is no propaganda needed. Economists serve an all-together different purpose and paradigm enforcement is very important. Of course, the individual economists may not be aware of the role they are playing. But the field has been shaped by its funding sources to represent their interests suitably and it turns out that people with an affection for useless but elegant simple models and an enthusiasm for paradigm-enforcement are best for that role.

I think all this gets resolved easily by understanding that ‘economics’ is not about economics. Nor is it about capitalism. I have yet to meet a CEO who runs their business with anything remotely like neo-classical models/methods in mind. They all seem to love central planning of varying degrees. My experience in business suggests that capitalists are far more pragmatic and much more attuned with apostates like Marx and Keynes than they are with anything that has emerged from the mind of someone like Lucas. His economics seems to be designed to describe his own mood rather than anything outside imagination.
I also agree that Krugman has pulled his punches, he wants dissension of a very gentlemanly kind. Sorry Paul: time to take to the streets and burn it all down.

Adding on to #42, in reply to #40 – think of a bunch of neoconmen, performing a media campaign for the latest war. They’ll talk a bunch of pseudo-historical shite, throw a bunch of moral BS in peoples’ faces, and produce faux academic analyses.

The actual military part of fighting such a war doesn’t need that type of crap; Ph.D.’s need to be brought in to lecture Marine units.

Paradigm-enforcement is problematic even if the enforced paradigm has not yet been refuted. Basically it consists of, without adequate justification, enforcing one specific research program, methodology and set of heuristic fictions at the expense of all others and putting its basic principles out of question.

Excluding flat earthers, creationists, and alchemists from science is paradigm enforcement only under the most perverse definition of the term. None of them can argue their case in a scientific context. Paradigm enforcement is the arbitrary establishment of an approach without adequate grounds, and it’s something that happens in many or most academic graduate departments.

According to Redmond, Lakatos came close to saying that a paradigm (or a research program, his term) cannot possibly be refuted. A paradigm isn’t a truth but an approach. So you can’t really say that the Chicago paradigm was refuted, but it certainly became infinitely less persuasive and appealing in recent months — though that apparently hasn’t reduced the rigor of the enforcement.

Since 1950 or so what’s called mainstream, orthodox, or neoclassical economics has been very successful in suppressing everything else, especially Marxist and Austrian economics, but also the old Keynesian, old institutionalist, and German historical schools. (Within the mainstream the Chicago school has been especially aggressive, and they’ve seemingly been more successful than the others in representing economics to the general public).

Most of the triumphant economists believe and loudly claim that their opponents are the equivalent of creationists, alchemist, or flat Earthers. That’s their predictable standard justification of their paradigm enforcement, but it begs the question of who is right. They never really made their case, and recent events have destroyed it.

42, 45: surely you can see that you’re bending analysis to fit whatever facts come up. I don’t think neoclassicals are very good propagandists.

Superstructure can get loose from base in all kinds of ways. John at #49 is right, and Philip Mirowski is teh roxxor.

I’d also argue, against most on this thread, that there is plenty of interesting and useful stuff going on in neoclassical economics. It’s hardly a swindle or a ruse. They should be encouraged to do what they do, they just shouldn’t have hegemony.

I would expect this hoped for ‘Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom’ campaign to be as successful as it was in 1956-57 in the PRC.

re 32 The so-called ‘Cognitive Revolution’ for example, in psychology, was clearly an attempt to turn psychology into a ‘cyborg science’: technocratic, mathematical, deterministic, reductionistic, with aims that fitted in with specific American military goals

Which part of Noam Chomsky’s work falls into this category?

Amending the last: Apologies…I read too fast and skipped the “in psychology” modifier. Nevertheless, Chomsky had a role in the cognitive revolution and it is hard to see, on the surface at least, what he has to do with militarism. Chomsky was way useful for imperialists. If you were a reasonable person who thought the Russians love their children too, even though you actually never met a Russian and couldn’t understand them either, then Chomsky was there as an English-speaking Actual Human to irritate the hell out of you until you chose whatever he says you shouldn’t.

“Chomsky’s early work was sponsored by the American military”

And Chomsky occasionally notes it with some amusement. The Sound Pattern of English was published in 1959, and the logic of military spending in academia at the time was that of Vannevar Bush more than anything else: fund it all, wait and see what pops out that might be useful. There were instances of the US government funding humanities with specific political goals in mind – I don’t deny that – but considering that Chomsky’s famous early work was in phonology and came 30 years before the first inklings of speech recognition, I’m inclined to accept Chomsky’s account that he was funded by the military because everything at MIT in the 50s was funded by the military, including – in his words – the music department. AI and machine translation plays no explicit part in any of Chomsky’s work. In fact, applications of any kind play practically no part in Chomsky’s work, even implicitly.

I’m as anti-Chomskyan as it gets. (Yes, I am a linguist working in government funded artificial intelligence work with significant, if distant, potential military applications.) The crimes he’s actually guilty of are bad enough. No need to put on him ones he’s not really involved in.

‘The crimes he’s actually guilty of are bad enough. No need to put on him ones he’s not really involved in.’

Just to be absolutely and completely clear: I wasn’t accusing Chomsky of anything.

Scott, you have done well in denouncing the technocratic rationalist enemy of the people Chomsky but you are still a technocratic, mathematical, deterministic, reductionistic cyborg scientist, I’m afraid.

After the revolution numbers will be replaced with words. All scientific paradigms will be permanently dissolved and researchers will just ‘go with the flow’. Anyone who espouses bourgeois doctrines like ‘calculus’ or ‘logic’ will be blacklisted from academic posts concerning the social sciences, which will henceforth be carried out by means of internet flame wars between rival coalitions of wikipedia-reading humanists.

Chomsky is become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

The ones who like what they’re offered or who are ambitious enough to suppress their own thinking continue. Those who don’t and aren’t usually leave the field.

What about those who have strong reservations about the ‘paradigm’ they have the opportunity to study but feel that it is worth learning about things before you try to criticise them?

What about those who have strong reservations about the ‘paradigm’ they have the opportunity to study but feel that it is worth learning about things before you try to criticise them?

You mean wonderful people like yourself?

Some people have the patience to slog through grad school while keeping their own counsel about their reservations and disagreements, but that’s hard to do, and the more orthodox and more competitive a department is the harder it is. (At the U of Chicago bright young things compete to be more that way, not less.)

It’s not generally true that you have to eat the whole egg to decide whether it’s bad.

The journals I mentioned in 17 contain decades of research in non-mainstream paradigms. (These include, for example, Colin Danby’s infusion of feminism into Post Keynesian economics.) Mainstream economists do not refute these non-mainstream paradigms or demonstrate theirs are superior in any sense. They just ignore their existence. Mainstream economists are socialized to be anti-intellectual and to conform to standards that would not be acceptable in any field with scholarly standards.

I’m neither anonymous nor pseudonymous, “Engels”. Please direct your digs more accurately.

Chicago school economics has been sharply and accurately criticized by people who are completely familiar with it, and it hasn’t collapsed. It isn’t even weakened, and may still be gaining strength despite what Krugman and DeLong say. Once a paradigm is institutionalized it’s hard to shake. (Look how long scholasticism lasted.)

In any case, beginning grad students should not be required to master a paradigm or refute it before choosing to study something else. My claim (based on Mirowski and Redman) is that economics, like other fields, has been wrongly narrowed by academic and bureaucratic politics (in many cases under outside, non-academic pressure), and that valid forms of investigation have been marginalized, and that good people have been driven from the field, and that this was a bad thing and not necessary either. Do you disagree?

Alchemy and astrology were difficult and subtle disciplines that laid the foundations of chemistry and astronomy (and classical physics) but at any point along the way it was valid to say, without mastering these disciplines, that mercury the element and Mercury the planet have nothing much to do with one another, and the present location of Mercury in the star chart has nothing to do with anything.

OK, but I thought I was the target, because I do more of that stuff than anyone else here.

To cite the author of this thread:

The tragedy of this is that there is, within the bloated corpus of economics, a perfectly nice slimmed-down little science struggling to get out…..What economics needs to lose is a lot of metaphysical baggage, plus a lot of needy f-type personalities.

I would support a salvage operation on neoclassical economics, but to the neoclassical economists themselves, the necessary salvage operation would look like the sack of Rome.

I wonder how you think they should be educated.

They should not be treated as neutral raw material to be banged into shape. The apparent assumption is that when they show up at grad school with no knowledge of anything, and that for that reason they should take no part in the direction of their education, but just follow orders.

I’m not familiar with every Anglophone philosophy department that there is, and mostly know about American rather than British school, but from what I can tell, most departments are pretty null, and teach methods which seem to preclude the possibility of productive thought about politics. Several trips to the library to look at journals, including those declared by Leiter to be most influential, haven’t given me any reason to change my mind.

Politically the problem with analytic philosophy isn’t rightism, or the political opinions of the philosophers themselves, but the disabling effects of analytic methods and the crowding-out of other kinds of philosophy.

The political sin of analytic phil

‘First-year graduate students are normally presented with a very limited range of permissible options for a study plan…’

I don’t know whether this is true in economics, but it’s not true of any philosophy department I’m familiar with.

‘The political sin of analytic phil’

Did the Dark Powers of Analyticisism finally manage to kill John Emerson while he was half way through writing that sentence?

Well, I guess that’s the last we’ll hear of it.

Milton Friedman, in a famous article in 1953, argued that the only valid test of an economic model was its predictive powers, and, in particular, a criticism that a theory’s assumptions were not realistic was not a valid criticism. In my view, this statement is manifest nonsense

Isn’t it just American pragmatism? (Iirc an Emerson-approved doctrine.)

Analogies with rotten eggs aren’t a good to think about how to go about intervening in intellectual controversies. ‘Knowing’ that a theory is bad doesn’t give you the resources to undermine its authority in the eyes of others (trolling academic blogs aside). There are several means of doing the latter and not all of them require knowledge of the theory (eg. contributing to a competing theory). But criticism is one such means and it does. To criticse foundations might not require knowledge of the rest of the structure but it requires knowledge of the foundations.

” ‘Knowing’ that a theory is bad doesn’t give you the resources to undermine its authority in the eyes of others (trolling academic blogs aside). There are several means of doing the latter and not all of them require knowledge of the theory (eg. contributing to a competing theory). But criticism is one such means and it does. To criticse foundations might not require knowledge of the rest of the structure but it requires knowledge of the foundations.”

I (and many others before me) are not claiming to “know” that a theory is bad. We are claiming that a theory which purports to describe some social phenomenon cannot rest on unrealistic or unfalsifiable assumptions about the entities (economic actors) in the domain of study. Milton Friedman and his acolytes claim that it can. This is an argument about the appropriate means of doing economics and about the nature of economic modeling.