It seems to me that mainstream economists are socialized into ignorance and anti-scholarly norm. Plenty of economists exist that so many economists dismiss as 'fringe', and yet these dismissed economists excel on any scholarly criteria. It is not just that mainstream economists do not know of vast bodies of scholarship, produced by academics around the world. They also do not know that what they believe has long ago been shown to be without foundation. I have gone on like this before.
I might as well list the sort scholarly criteria I have in mind. I am thinking of economists with doctorates from well-known universities, who have published numerous journal articles and books from academic presses. They have edited such books and garnered many citations. They have supervised doctorate dissertations, where their students go on to other universities to do the same. They have been visiting professors at universities around the world, and maybe have occupied a named chair. They have been head of their department or otherwise provided successful service in academic administration. They have founded or co-founded journals and have been on the board of editors of various journals. They have provided policy advice and received festschrifts from those who have built on their work. They have written textbooks.
I should provide a small list of examples of scholars who rank on multiple criteria like the above:
I could expand this list, but I figure I do not want to embarrass too many with such fulsome praise.
This state of affairs may have something to do with abolishing the history of economic thought and any study of methodology. I do not expect recent mainstream economists to have read Smith's Wealth, Marx's Capital, or Keynes' General Theory. Sraffa's PoCbMoC is simultaneously an epoch-making book and virtually unknown. Fred Lee's A History of Heterodox Economics Challenging the mainstream in the twentieth century documents purges of economics departments.
I think mainstream economics are socialized to believe some questionable claims, based on rumors. For example, Marx was discredited by the marginal revolution. They cannot be expected to know of work in mathematical economics during the 1970s and 1980s formalizing Marx and empirical work that built on it. They'll believe Keynes was shown to be wrong by stagflation in the 1970s. The phrase 'bastard Keynesianism' is unknown, as are earlier theories of stagflation. The Arrow-Debreu-McKenzie model of intertemporal equilibrium is simultaneously the foundation of price theory and no longer central to economics.
But perhaps my perception of the sociology of economics is all wrong.
Posts
3 comments:
«I think mainstream economics are socialized to believe some questionable claims, based on rumors. [...] But perhaps my perception of the sociology of economics is all wrong.»
I hope that you are pretending to be naive here, because it is actually quite simple and overt: academic macro and micro economics are based on "internal consistency", and in particular consistency with with J.B. Clark's three parables. What is not compatible with "internal consistency" is something else, and that something else occasionally gets published on "fringe" journals.
«academic macro and micro economics are based on "internal consistency", and in particular consistency with with J.B. Clark's three parables.»
The interesting question is why academic macro and micro are bound by "internal" consistency and specifically that with JB Clark's three parables (one in particular).
https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2016/09/economics-dsge-and-reality-personal.html
“My idea that by working at the Treasury I could avoid clashes between different schools of thought was of course naive. Although the institution I joined had a well developed and empirically orientated Keynesian framework [2], it immediately came under attack from monetarists, and once again we had different schools using different models and talking past each other. [...]
NIESR was like a halfway house between academia and the Treasury: research, but with forecasting rather than teaching. I became very involved in building structural econometric models and doing empirical research to back them up. I built the first version of what is now called NIGEM (a world model widely used by policy making and financial institutions), and with Stephen Hall incorporated rational expectations and other New Classical elements into their domestic model. [...]
I went to Strathclyde University at Glasgow partly because they agreed to give temporary funding to two colleagues at NIESR to come with me so we could bid to build a new UK model. [3] At the time the UK’s social science research funding body, the ESRC, allocated a significant proportion of its funds to support econometric macromodels, subject to competitions every 4 years. It also funded a Bureau at Warwick university that analysed and compared the main UK models. This Bureau at its best allowed a strong link between academia and policy debate.
Our bid was successful, and in the model called COMPACT I would argue we built the first UK large scale structural econometric model which was New Keynesian but which also incorporated innovative features like an influence of (exogenous) financial conditions on intertemporal consumption decisions. [...]
But the writing was on the wall for this kind of modelling in the UK, because it did not fit the ‘it has to be DSGE’ edict from the US. A third round of funding, which wanted to add more influences from the financial sector into the model using ideas based on work by Stiglitz and Greenwald, was rejected because our approach was ‘old fashioned’ i.e not DSGE. (The irony given events some 20 years later is immense, and helped inform this paper.) [...]
As my modelling work had always been heavily theory based, I had no problem moving with the tide, and now at Exeter university with Campbell Leith we began a very successful stream of work looking at monetary and fiscal policy interactions using DSGE models. [5] We obtained a series of ESRC grants for this work, again all subsequently rated as outstanding. Having to ensure everything was microfounded I think created more heat than light, but I learnt a great deal from this work which would prove invaluable over the last decade.”
A friend of mine humored me yesterday by looking at a draft paper I have submitted somewhere. He said, "I feel like I need to read an economics textbook." I told him not to bother; they do not teach this stuff. I did have a qualification about Leontief, Von Neumann, and linear programming.
Post a Comment