Alternative Economics In Mechanics' Institutes And Think Tanks

Various nonacademic institutions have helped shaped the development of academic economics. Fred Lee, in his recent history, describes some aspects of the culture of university economics departments:

"Intellectual bullying of heterodox-interested graduate students; denying appointments, reappointments, and tenure to heterodox economists; red-baiting; and professional ostracism/discrimination" (Lee 2009)

In the United States around 1945, some institutions outside universities provided intellectual support and culture for left-wing intellectuals, including economists. I refer to schools for workers supported to some extent by the Communist Party:

• School for Jewish Studies (New York)
• Jefferson School for Social Science (New York)
• Abraham Lincoln School (Chicago)
• Samuel Adams School (Boston)
• Boston School for Marxist Studies
• Tom Paine School of Social Sciences (Philadelphia)
• Walt Whitman School of Social Sciences (Newark)
• Joseph Weydemeyer School of Social Sciences (St. Louis)
• Ohio School of Social Sciences (Cleveland)
• Michigan School of Social Sciences (Detroit)
• Seattle/Pacific Northwest Labor School
• Tom Mooney/California Labor School (San Francisco)

Under Truman, these schools were listed by the Attorney General as subversive. With continued McCarthyist oppression, none existed by 1957.

On the other hand, extremely rich reactionaries paid economists to argue for right wing views. This funding went to both universities and to think tanks set up since the workers' schools were shut down. Some examples:

• Harold Luhnow, who made his fortune selling furniture, is important for the history at, among other places, the University of Chicago (Van Horn and Mirowski 2009)
• Jasper Crane, a former executive of the DuPont Chemical Company was a major funder at one point of the Mont Pélerin Society (Phillips-Fein 2009)
• Sir Antony Fisher, who introduced factory farming into Great Britain, set up the Institute of Economic Affairs in Great Britain (Blundell 2007, Mitchell 2009)
• Leonard Read led the Foundation for Economic Education
• Edward H. Crane founded the Cato Institute in 1977

Perhaps the long history of oppression of economists with certain views and funding of economists with others has had some influence on what ideas are developed. The above only provides a very limited glimpse of political interventions into academic economics. Much more can be found for those willing to look.

References

• John Blundell (2007) Waging the War of Ideas,Third and expanded edition, Institute of Economic Affairs
• Colleen Dyble (editor) (2008) Taming Leviathan: Waging the War of Ideas Around the World, Institute of Economic Affairs
• Frederic Lee (2009) A History of Heterodox Economics: Challenging the Mainstream in the Twentieth Century, Routledge
• Timothy Mitchell (2009) "How Neoliberalism Makes Its World: The Urban Property Rights Project in Peru", in The Road from Mont Pélerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (ed. by Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe), Harvard University Press.
• Kim Phillips-Fein (2009) "Business Conservatives and the Mont Pélerin Society", in The Road from Mont Pélerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (ed. by Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe), Harvard University Press.
• Rob Van Horn and Philip Mirowski (2009) "The Rise of the Chicago School of Economics and the Birth of Neoliberalism", in The Road from Mont Pélerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (ed. by Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe), Harvard University Press.