Economists who achieve fame for genuine intellectual insights, like Paul Krugman, sometimes then morph into ideologues—predominantly although not exclusively on the left. The leftish domination of American academia is partly explained by economics. Federal student-loan programs, state appropriations, special tax preferences and federal research-overhead funds have underwritten academic prosperity, even at so-called private schools. The leftish agenda today is one of big government; academics are rent-seekers who generally don’t bite the hand that feeds them. The problem is even worse in other “social sciences.”
Wednesday, March 2, 2016
Case Study: Paul Krugman as Ideologue
Richard K. Vedder writes:
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I doubt it's malicious. Do you really think these academics knowingly espouse a philosophy they know is wrong? It's more likely they've never even been exposed to Austrian ideas.
ReplyDeleteBeing afraid to speak out against the status quot is what most are probably guilty of doing (ie, don't bite the hand that feeds you). Secondly, these people have been trained to approach economics through quantitative methods--build a model and prove your hypothesis. Austrian economics would be of little interest to them since it doesn't fit this approach.
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